The term frankolevantinika properly refers to the use of the Latin script to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism.
Indeed, the autograph manuscripts of several Greek literary works of the Renaissance are in Latin script (e.g. the comedy Fortounatos by Markos Antonios Foskolos, 1655).
In particular, iotacism is preserved: the various letters and digraphs now pronounced as /i/ are transcribed as i, and not differentiated as they are in an orthographic scheme (e.g. h, i, u, ei, oi for η ι υ ει οι).
The reason the same word is, in this occasion, written without the letter "e", is the fact that, phonetically, the word "square" in Greek sounds exactly like this: "platia" (since -"εί"- is now pronounced /i/, as an instance of iotacism), but not for the phonology and the historical or learned pronunciation of the Ancient Greek language (where it was "plateia").
Since there were many relevant differences both in the written and in the spoken language—such as in the grammar, orthography and phonology of Greek- at the time of the Ancient Greek, the Koine, Jewish Koine, Medieval and Modern, thus the same word across the history may change outstandingly and therefore have multiple choices of "rendering" (transliteration or transcription) depending on the time on which the referring text was written or translated.
The original book was written entirely in the form of e-mail messages, something that prompted Androutsopoulos and his collaborators to publish a version of it in Greeklish.
In the past there was a variety of mutually incompatible systems for displaying non-ASCII characters (IBM 437, ELOT 928, ISO 8859-7 plus a few company-specific encodings) and no standard method for typing them on a computer keyboard.
Almost all electronic mail messaging was also using Greeklish, and only recently, with the introduction of full Unicode compatibility in modern e-mail client software and gradual replacement of older programs, that usage of Greek characters became widespread.
This is done to ensure that the recipient can understand an important service message even if the settings of their computer for non-ASCII characters don't match those of the sender.
A non-Greek speaker/reader can guess this by this example: "δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ" would be the way to write "this is hard to read" in English but utilizing the Greek alphabet.
However, Greeklish has been criticised because the user's text bypasses spellcheck, resulting in lowering their ability to write native Greek correctly.
[11] The first open online application for the transcription of Greeklish to Greek, was developed by Artificial Intelligence Group at University of Patras, named deGREEKLISH.