This article covers technical details of the
character encoding
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...
system defined by ETS 300 706, 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 CCIR 653 (now ITU-R BT.653) ...
, and used for the
Viewdata and
Teletext
A British Ceefax football index page from October 2009, showing the three-digit page numbers for a variety of football news stories
Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipp ...
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, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
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, character height, current default character set, and other attributes.
In formats where compatibility with
ECMA-48'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