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.
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 <code>\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}</code>, 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.
The encoding supports most European languages written in Latin alphabet. Notable exceptions are:
Languages with slightly suboptimal support include: