Windows-1253

Windows code page 1253 ("Greek - ANSI"), commonly known by its IANA-registered name Windows-1253 or abbreviated as cp1253, is a Microsoft Windows code page used to write modern Greek. It is not capable of supporting the older polytonic Greek.

It is not fully compatible with ISO 8859-7 because a few characters, including the letter Ά, are located at different byte values:


 * and  are added at their locations from Windows-1252 and ISO 8859-1 (0xB5 and 0xB6). This collides with the locations of   and , respectively, in ISO 8859-7.
 * and  are moved from their ISO 8859-7 locations (0xA1 and 0xA2) to their Windows-1252 locations (0x91 and 0x92). The displaced   and   are moved to the vacated space at 0xA1 and 0xA2 respectively.
 * and  are added at their locations from Windows-1252 and ISO 8859-1 (0xA4 and 0xA5). This collides with additions made to ISO 8859-7 in 2003, when   and   respectively were added to the same locations. The   was added to Windows-1253 at 0x80, the same location which it was added to in Windows-1252. An iota subscript (ͺ) was also added to ISO 8859-7 at 0xAA; this remains unallocated in Windows-1253.
 * Several further characters are added at their Windows-1252 locations, although the rest do not collide with ISO 8859-7.

IBM uses code page 1253 (CCSID 1253 and euro sign extended CCSID 5349) for Windows-1253.

Unicode is preferred for Greek in modern applications, especially as UTF-8 encoding on the Internet. Unicode provides many more glyphs for complete coverage, see Greek alphabet in Unicode and Ancient Greek Musical Notation for tables.

Character set
The following table shows Windows-1253. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent.

{{legend|#FFD|Differences from ISO 8859-7}}