Cork encoding

The Cork (also known as T1 or EC) encoding is a character encoding used for encoding glyphs in fonts. It is named after the city of Cork in Ireland, where during a TeX Users Group (TUG) conference in 1990 a new encoding was introduced for LaTeX. It contains 256 characters supporting most west- and east-European languages with the Latin alphabet.

Details
In 8-bit TeX engines the font encoding has to match the encoding of hyphenation patterns where this encoding is most commonly used. In LaTeX one can switch to this encoding with, while in ConTeXt MkII this is the default encoding already. In modern engines such as XeTeX and LuaTeX Unicode is fully supported and the 8-bit font encodings are obsolete.

Supported languages
The encoding supports most European languages written in Latin alphabet. Notable exceptions are: Languages with slightly suboptimal support include:
 * Esperanto and Maltese language (using IL3)
 * Latvian language and Lithuanian language (using L7X)
 * Welsh language
 * Galician language, Portuguese language and Spanish language – due to the lack of characters ª and º, which are not superscript versions of lowercase "a" and "o" (superscripts are thinner) and they are often underlined
 * Croatian language, Bosnian language, Serbian language – due to the shared use of the slot for Đ
 * Turkish language – due to dotless i having different uppercase and lowercase combinations than in other languages