This article covers technical details of the
character encoding
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...
system defined by ETS 300 706 of the
ETSI
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization operating in the field of Information and communications technology, information and communications. ETSI supports the de ...
, a standard for
World System Teletext
World System Teletext (WST) is the name of a standard for encoding and displaying teletext information, which is used as the standard for teletext throughout Europe today. It was adopted into the international standard ITU-R, CCIR 653 (now ITU-R ...
, and used for the
Viewdata
Viewdata is a Videotex implementation. It is a type of information retrieval service in which a subscriber can access a remote database via a common carrier channel, request data and receive requested data on a video display over a separate ...
and
Teletext
Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipped television sets. Teletext sends data in the broadcast signal, hidden in the invisible vertical blanking interval area at the to ...
variants of
Videotex
Videotex (or interactive videotex) was one of the earliest implementations of an end-user information system. From the late 1970s to early 2010s, it was used to deliver information (usually pages of text) to a user in computer-like format, typi ...
in Europe.
Character sets
The following tables show various Teletext character sets. Each character is shown with a potential
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
equivalent if available. Space and control characters are represented by the abbreviations for their names.
Control characters
Control characters are used to set foreground and background color (black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white, flash), character height (normal, double width, double height, double), current default character set, and other attributes.
In formats where compatibility with
ECMA-48
ANSI escape sequences are a standard for in-band signaling to control cursor location, color, font styling, and other options on video text terminals and terminal emulators. Certain sequences of bytes, most starting with an ASCII escape cha ...
's
C0 control codes such as and is not required, these control codes are sometimes mapped transparently to the Unicode C0 control code range (U+0000 through U+001F).
Amongst C1 control code sets, the
ITU T.101 C1 control codes for "Serial" Data Syntax 2,
are mostly a transposition of the Teletext spacing controls, except for the inclusion of at 0x9B.
Latin
G0
G2
Greek
G0
G2
Cyrillic
G0
G2
Arabic
Note that each Arabic
contextual/positional character in the tables below is shown with the non-positional Unicode equivalent if available.
G0
G2
Hebrew
Graphics character sets
G1 block mosaics
:
Same table as above, rendered with bitmaps:
:
G3 smooth mosaics and line drawing
References
{{character encodings
Character sets
Teletext