Teletext character set explained

This article covers technical details of the character encoding system defined by ETS 300 706 of the ETSI, a standard for World System Teletext, and used for the Viewdata and Teletext variants of Videotex in Europe.

Character sets

The following tables show various Teletext character sets. Each character is shown with a potential Unicode 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'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).[1] Amongst C1 control code sets, the ITU T.101 C1 control codes for "Serial" Data Syntax 2,[2] are mostly a transposition of the Teletext spacing controls, except for the inclusion of at 0x9B.

Latin

G2

Greek

G2

Cyrillic

G2

Arabic

Note that each Arabic contextual/positional character in the tables below is shown with the non-positional Unicode equivalent if available.

G2

Graphics character sets

G1 block mosaics

Same table as above, rendered with bitmaps:

G3 smooth mosaics and line drawing

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Teletext separated mosaic graphics . Unicode Mailing List Archive . Ewell . Doug . 2020-10-16 . Unicode Consortium.
  2. 56. Attribute Control Set for UK Videotex. 1982-06-01. British Standards Institution. British Standards Institution.