The ISO 8859 reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

ISO 8859

ISO 8859, more formally ISO/IEC 8859, is a set of currently 15 related ISO standards for 8-bit character encodings for use by computers. These standards are based upon ASCII, the most widely used 7-bit character encoding.

Table of contents

1 Introduction 2 Characters 3 Character Sets 4 Alternatives 5 Table 6 External References

Introduction

While the 128 ASCII characters are sufficient to exchange information in modern English without preventing comprehension, most other languages that use the Roman alphabet need additional symbols not covered by ASCII, such as ß (German), å (Swedish and other Nordic languages). ISO 8859 sought to remedy this problem by extending 7-bit ASCII to eight bits, allowing positions for another 128 characters. However, more characters were needed to achieve this than could fit in a single 8-bit character encoding, so several were developed (until now ten alone for Latin). All the encodings, however, encode the first 128 positions (from 0 to 127) in the same way as each other and the same way as ASCII. Positions 128 to 159 contain control characters. The upper 96 code points of each ISO 8859 encoding differ.

Characters

The ISO 8859 standards are designed for reliable information exchange, not typography. As a result, the standards omit symbols needed for high-quality typography, such as optional ligatures, curly quotation marks, dashes, etc. As a result, high-quality typesetting systems often use proprietary or idiosyncratic extensions on top of the ASCII and ISO 8859 standards, or use Unicode instead.

As a rule of thumb, if a character or symbol was not already part of a widely used data-processing character set and was also not usually provided on typewriter keyboards for a national language, it didn't get in. Hence the directional double quotation marks « and » used for some European languages were included, but not the directional double quotation marks “ and ” used for English and some other languages. French didn't get its œ and Œ ligatures because French speakers had not previously needed them enough to demand them on their keyboards; nor did it get Ÿ, because this character is only used in French in all caps text. These oversights were finally fixed with ISO 8859-15, which also introduced the new Euro character €. Likewise Dutch did not get the 'ij' and 'IJ' letters, because Dutch speakers had gotten used to typing 'ij' and 'IJ' instead. Romanian did not initially get its 'Ș/ș' and 'Ț/ț' letters, because they were falsely identified with 'Ş/ş' and 'Ţ/ţ'. The latter oversight was fixed with ISO 8859-16.

Most of the ISO 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages. Others provide non-Roman alphabets: Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. However, the standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages (CJK), as their ideographic writing systems require many thousands of code points. Although it uses Latin based characters, Vietnamese does not fit into 96 positions either; Japanese syllabic Kana scripts on the other hand might, but like several other alphapets of the world isn't encoded.

Character Sets

The encodings defined by ISO-8859 include:

• ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1 or Western European) — perhaps the most widely used ISO 8859 standard, covering most Western European languages: Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch (partial¹), English, Faeroese, Finnish (partial²), French (partial²), German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish, Spanish, Kurdish, and Swedish, as well as the African languages Afrikaans and Swahili. The missing Euro symbol and capital Ÿ are in the revised version ISO 8859-15. This encoding is the default encoding for legacy HTML documents.
• ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2 or Central European) — supports those Central and Eastern European languages that use a Roman alphabet, including Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Hungarian. The missing Euro symbol can be found in version ISO 8859-16.
• ISO 8859-3 (Latin-3 or South European) — Turkish, Maltese, and Esperanto; largely superseded by ISO 8859-9 for Turkish and Unicode for Esperanto.
• ISO 8859-4 (Latin-4 or North European) — Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, and Sami.
• ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic) — Covers most East European languages that use a Cyrillic alphabet, including Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.
• ISO 8859-6 (Arabic) — Covers the most common Arabic glyphs, although not nearly all of them.
• ISO 8859-7 (Greek) — Covers the modern Greek language (monotonic orthography). Can also be used for Ancient Greek written without accents or in monotonic orthography, but lacks the diacritics for polytonic orthography. These were introduced with Unicode.
• ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew) — Covers the modern Hebrew alphabet as used in Israel. In practice two different encodings exist, logical and visual.
• ISO 8859-9 (Latin-5 or Turkish) — Largely the same as ISO 8859-1, replacing the rarely used Icelandic letters with Turkish ones.
• ISO 8859-10 (Latin-6 or Nordic) — a rearrangement of Latin-4. Considered more useful for Nordic languages. Baltic languages use Latin-4 more.
• ISO 8859-11 (Thai) — Contains most glyphs needed for the Thai language.
• ISO 8859-12 — was supposed to be Latin-7 and cover Celtic, but this draft was rejected. Numbering continued with -13.
• ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7 or Baltic Rim) — Added some glyphs for Baltic languages which were missing from Latin-4 and Latin-6.
• ISO 8859-14 (Latin-8 or Celtic) — Mostly a rearrangement of the ISO-8859-12 draft. Covers Celtic languages like Gaelic and the Breton language.
• ISO 8859-15 (Latin-9) — a revision of 8859-1 that removes some little-used symbols, replacing them with the Euro symbol € and the letters Š, š, Ž, ž, Œ, œ, and Ÿ, which completes the coverage of French and Finnish.
• ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10 or South-Eastern European) — Intended for Albanian, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Slovenian, but also Finnish, French, German and Irish Gaelic (new orthography). The focus lies more on letters than symbols. The currency sign is replaced with the Euro symbol.

¹: only the IJ/ij (Dutch Y) is missing, which can be represented as IJ
²: missing characters are in ISO 8859-15

The ISO 8859 standards are designed to allow many language combinations within one charset, but even among the Latin script there are a lot of combinations that are not possible without transcriptions. While writing English is possible with ASCII alone and thus in all ISO 8859 sets, efforts were made to make conversions as smooth as possible. For example, German has all its seven special chars at the same positions in all Latin variants (1-4, 9+10, 13-16), and on many positions the characters only differ in the diacritics between the sets.

As of 2004 no new drafts exist, as it seems 8-bit character encodings are finally being replaced by Unicode. ISO 8859-17 is therefore meaningless in the context of character encoding.

Alternatives

An alternative character set standard called Unicode was developed to unify coverage of the other character sets. It supports over a million code points (ISO 8859: 191) by using several character encodings of 8-bit, 16-bit, or variable-length words. Because Unicode does away with the limitations of 8-bit character encodings, it is often preferred for new applications. However, ISO 8859 has the advantage of being well-established, and simpler software is needed to manipulate it: the equation of one byte to one character holds, there are no combining characters or variant forms, and fonts remain conveniently small. Unicode's first 256 characters are identical to ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1). Most modern software uses Unicode internally, and maps the older 8-bit encodings like ISO 8859 to Unicode using conversion tables.

Table

Comparison of the various parts of ISO-8859

Binary	Oct	Dec	Hex	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	13	14	15	16
10100000	240	160	A0	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP	NBSP
10100001	241	161	A1	¡	Ą	Ħ	Ą	Ё		ʽ		¡	Ą	ก	"	Ḃ	¡	Ą
10100010	242	162	A2	¢	˘	˘	ĸ	Ђ		ʼ	¢	¢	Ē	ข	¢	ḃ	¢	ą
10100011	243	163	A3	£	Ł	£	Ŗ	Ѓ		£	£	£	Ģ	ฃ	£	£	£	Ł
10100100	244	164	A4	¤	¤	¤	¤	Є	¤		¤	¤	Ī	ค	¤	Ċ	€	€
10100101	245	165	A5	Â¥	Ľ		Ĩ	Ѕ			Â¥	Â¥	Ĩ	ฅ	"	ċ	Â¥	"
10100110	246	166	A6	¦	Ś	Ĥ	Ļ	І		¦	¦	¦	Ķ	ฆ	¦	Ḋ	Š	Š
10100111	247	167	A7	§	§	§	§	Ї		§	§	§	§	ง	§	§	§	§
10101000	250	168	A8	¨	¨	¨	¨	Ј		¨	¨	¨	Ļ	จ	Ø	Ẁ	š	š
10101001	251	169	A9	©	Š	İ	Š	Љ		©	©	©	Đ	ฉ	©	©	©	©
10101010	252	170	AA	ª	Ş	Ş	Ē	Њ			×	ª	Š	ช	Ŗ	Ẃ	ª	Ș
10101011	253	171	AB	«	Ť	Ğ	Ģ	Ћ		«	«	«	Ŧ	ซ	«	ḋ	«	«
10101100	254	172	AC	¬	Ź	Ĵ	Ŧ	Ќ	،	¬	¬	¬	Ž	ฌ	¬	Ỳ	¬	Ź
10101101	255	173	AD	­	­	­	­	­	­	­	­	­	­	ญ	­	­	­	­
10101110	256	174	AE	®	Ž		Ž	Ў			®	®	Ū	ฎ	®	®	®	ź
10101111	257	175	AF	¯	Ż	Ż	¯	Џ		―	‾	¯	Ŋ	ฏ	Æ	Ÿ	¯	Ż
10110000	260	176	B0	°	°	°	°	А		°	°	°	°	ฐ	°	Ḟ	°	°
10110001	261	177	B1	±	ą	ħ	ą	Б		±	±	±	ą	ฑ	±	ḟ	±	±
10110010	262	178	B2	²	˛	²	˛	В		²	²	²	ē	ฒ	²	Ġ	²	Č
10110011	263	179	B3	³	ł	³	ŗ	Г		³	³	³	ģ	ณ	³	ġ	³	ł
10110100	264	180	B4	´	´	´	´	Д		΄	´	´	ī	ด	"	Ṁ	Ž	Ž
10110101	265	181	B5	µ	ľ	µ	ĩ	Е		΅	µ	µ	ĩ	ต	µ	ṁ	µ	"
10110110	266	182	B6	¶	ś	ĥ	ļ	Ж		Ά	¶	¶	ķ	ถ	¶	¶	¶	¶
10110111	267	183	B7	·	ˇ	·	ˇ	З		·	·	·	·	ท	·	Ṗ	·	·
10111000	270	184	B8	¸	¸	¸	¸	И		Έ	¸	¸	ļ	ธ	ø	ẁ	ž	ž
10111001	271	185	B9	¹	š	ı	š	Й		Ή	¹	¹	đ	น	¹	ṗ	¹	č
10111010	272	186	BA	º	ş	ş	ē	К		Ί	÷	º	š	บ	ŗ	ẃ	º	ș
10111011	273	187	BB	»	ť	ğ	ģ	Л	؛	»	»	»	ŧ	ป	»	Ṡ	»	»
10111100	274	188	BC	¼	ź	ĵ	ŧ	М		Ό	¼	¼	ž	ผ	¼	ỳ	Œ	Œ
10111101	275	189	BD	½	˝	½	Ŋ	Н		½	½	½	―	ฝ	½	Ẅ	œ	œ
10111110	276	190	BE	¾	ž		ž	О		Ύ	¾	¾	ū	พ	¾	ẅ	Ÿ	Ÿ
10111111	277	191	BF	¿	ż	ż	ŋ	П	؟	Ώ		¿	ŋ	ฟ	æ	ṡ	¿	ż
11000000	300	192	C0	À	Ŕ	À	Ā	Р		ΐ		À	Ā	ภ	Ą	À	À	À
11000001	301	193	C1	Á	Á	Á	Á	С	ء	Α		Á	Á	ม	Į	Á	Á	Á
11000010	302	194	C2	Â	Â	Â	Â	Т	آ	Β		Â	Â	ย	Ā	Â	Â	Â
11000011	303	195	C3	Ã	Ă		Ã	У	أ	Γ		Ã	Ã	ร	Ć	Ã	Ã	Ă
11000100	304	196	C4	Ä	Ä	Ä	Ä	Ф	ؤ	Δ		Ä	Ä	ฤ	Ä	Ä	Ä	Ä
11000101	305	197	C5	ÃÂÂ	Ĺ	Ċ	ÃÂÂ	Х	إ	Ε		ÃÂÂ	ÃÂÂ	ล	ÃÂÂ	ÃÂÂ	ÃÂÂ	Ć
11000110	306	198	C6	Æ	Ć	Ĉ	Æ	Ц	ئ	Ζ		Æ	Æ	ฦ	Ę	Æ	Æ	Æ
11000111	307	199	C7	Ç	Ç	Ç	Į	Ч	ا	Η		Ç	Į	ว	Ē	Ç	Ç	Ç
11001000	310	200	C8	È	Č	È	Č	Ш	ب	Θ		È	Č	ศ	Č	È	È	È
11001001	311	201	C9	É	É	É	É	Щ	ة	Ι		É	É	ษ	É	É	É	É
11001010	312	202	CA	Ê	Ę	Ê	Ę	Ъ	ت	Κ		Ê	Ę	ส	Ź	Ê	Ê	Ê
11001011	313	203	CB	Ë	Ë	Ë	Ë	Ы	ث	Λ		Ë	Ë	ห	Ė	Ë	Ë	Ë
11001100	314	204	CC	Ì	Ě	Ì	Ė	Ь	ج	Μ		Ì	Ė	ฬ	Ģ	Ì	Ì	Ì
11001101	315	205	CD	Í	Í	Í	Í	Э	ح	Ν		Í	Í	อ	Ķ	Í	Í	Í
11001110	316	206	CE	Î	Î	Î	Î	Ю	خ	Ξ		Î	Î	ฮ	Ī	Î	Î	Î
11001111	317	207	CF	Ï	Ď	Ï	Ī	Я	د	Ο		Ï	Ï	ฯ	Ļ	Ï	Ï	Ï
11010000	320	208	D0	Ð	Đ		Đ	а	ذ	Π		Ğ	Ð	ะ	Š	Ŵ	Ð	Ð
11010001	321	209	D1	Ñ	Ń	Ñ	Ņ	б	ر	Ρ		Ñ	Ņ	ั	Ń	Ñ	Ñ	Ń
11010010	322	210	D2	Ò	Ň	Ò	Ō	в	ز			Ò	Ō	า	Ņ	Ò	Ò	Ò
11010011	323	211	D3	Ó	Ó	Ó	Ķ	г	س	Σ		Ó	Ó	ำ	Ó	Ó	Ó	Ó
11010100	324	212	D4	Ô	Ô	Ô	Ô	д	ش	Τ		Ô	Ô	ิ	Ō	Ô	Ô	Ô
11010101	325	213	D5	Õ	Ő	Ġ	Õ	е	ص	Υ		Õ	Õ	ี	Õ	Õ	Õ	Ő
11010110	326	214	D6	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö	ж	ض	Φ		Ö	Ö	ึ	Ö	Ö	Ö	Ö
11010111	327	215	D7	×	×	×	×	з	ط	Χ		×	Ũ	ื	×	Ṫ	×	Ś
11011000	330	216	D8	Ø	Ř	Ĝ	Ø	и	ظ	Ψ		Ø	Ø	ุ	Ų	Ø	Ø	Ű
11011001	331	217	D9	Ù	Ů	Ù	Ų	й	ع	Ω		Ù	Ų	ู	Ł	Ù	Ù	Ù
11011010	332	218	DA	Ú	Ú	Ú	Ú	к	غ	Ϊ		Ú	Ú	ฺ	Ś	Ú	Ú	Ú
11011011	333	219	DB	Û	Ű	Û	Û	л		Ϋ		Û	Û		Ū	Û	Û	Û
11011100	334	220	DC	Ü	Ü	Ü	Ü	м		ά		Ü	Ü		Ü	Ü	Ü	Ü
11011101	335	221	DD	Ý	Ý	Ŭ	Ũ	н		έ		İ	Ý		Ż	Ý	Ý	Ę
11011110	336	222	DE	Þ	Ţ	Ŝ	Ū	о		ή		Ş	Þ		Ž	Ŷ	Þ	Ț
11011111	337	223	DF	ß	ß	ß	ß	п		ί	‗	ß	ß	฿	ß	ß	ß	ß
11100000	340	224	E0	ÃÂÂ	ŕ	ÃÂÂ	ā	р	ـ	ΰ	א	ÃÂÂ	ā	เ	ą	ÃÂÂ	ÃÂÂ	ÃÂÂ
11100001	341	225	E1	á	á	á	á	с	ف	α	ב	á	á	แ	į	á	á	á
11100010	342	226	E2	â	â	â	â	т	ق	β	ג	â	â	โ	ā	â	â	â
11100011	343	227	E3	ã	ă		ã	у	ك	γ	ד	ã	ã	ใ	ć	ã	ã	ă
11100100	344	228	E4	ä	ä	ä	ä	ф	ل	δ	ה	ä	ä	ไ	ä	ä	ä	ä
11100101	345	229	E5	Ã¥	ĺ	ċ	Ã¥	х	م	ε	ו	Ã¥	Ã¥	ๅ	Ã¥	Ã¥	Ã¥	ć
11100110	346	230	E6	æ	ć	ĉ	æ	ц	ن	ζ	ז	æ	æ	ๆ	ę	æ	æ	æ
11100111	347	231	E7	ç	ç	ç	į	ч	ه	η	ח	ç	į	็	ē	ç	ç	ç
11101000	350	232	E8	è	č	è	č	ш	و	θ	ט	è	č	่	č	è	è	è
11101001	351	233	E9	é	é	é	é	щ	ى	ι	י	é	é	้	é	é	é	é
11101010	352	234	EA	ê	ę	ê	ę	ъ	ي	κ	ך	ê	ę	๊	ź	ê	ê	ê
11101011	353	235	EB	ë	ë	ë	ë	ы	ً	λ	כ	ë	ë	๋	ė	ë	ë	ë
11101100	354	236	EC	ì	ě	ì	ė	ь	ٌ	μ	ל	ì	ė	์	ģ	ì	ì	ì
11101101	355	237	ED	í	í	í	í	э	ٍ	ν	ם	í	í	ํ	ķ	í	í	í
11101110	356	238	EE	î	î	î	î	ю	َ	ξ	מ	î	î	๎	ī	î	î	î
11101111	357	239	EF	ï	ď	ï	ī	я	ُ	ο	ן	ï	ï	๏	ļ	ï	ï	ï
11110000	360	240	F0	ð	đ		đ	№	ِ	π	נ	ğ	ð	๐	š	ŵ	ð	đ
11110001	361	241	F1	ñ	ń	ñ	ņ	ё	ّ	ρ	ס	ñ	ņ	๑	ń	ñ	ñ	ń
11110010	362	242	F2	ò	ň	ò	ō	ђ	ْ	ς	ע	ò	ō	๒	ņ	ò	ò	ò
11110011	363	243	F3	ó	ó	ó	ķ	ѓ		σ	ף	ó	ó	๓	ó	ó	ó	ó
11110100	364	244	F4	ô	ô	ô	ô	є		τ	פ	ô	ô	๔	ō	ô	ô	ô
11110101	365	245	F5	õ	ő	ġ	õ	ѕ		υ	ץ	õ	õ	๕	õ	õ	õ	ő
11110110	366	246	F6	ö	ö	ö	ö	і		φ	צ	ö	ö	๖	ö	ö	ö	ö
11110111	367	247	F7	÷	÷	÷	÷	ї		χ	ק	÷	ũ	๗	÷	ṫ	÷	ś
11111000	370	248	F8	ø	ř	ĝ	ø	ј		ψ	ר	ø	ø	๘	ų	ø	ø	ű
11111001	371	249	F9	ù	ů	ù	ų	љ		ω	ש	ù	ų	๙	ł	ù	ù	ù
11111010	372	250	FA	ú	ú	ú	ú	њ		ϊ	ת	ú	ú	๚	ś	ú	ú	ú
11111011	373	251	FB	û	ű	û	û	ћ		ϋ		û	û	๛	ū	û	û	û
11111100	374	252	FC	ü	ü	ü	ü	ќ		ό		ü	ü		ü	ü	ü	ü
11111101	375	253	FD	ý	ý	ŭ	ũ	§		ύ		ı	ý		ż	ý	ý	ę
11111110	376	254	FE	þ	ţ	ŝ	ū	ў		ώ		ş	þ		ž	ŷ	þ	ț
11111111	377	255	FF	ÿ	˙	˙	˙	џ				ÿ	ĸ		’	ÿ	ÿ	ÿ

At position 0xA0 there's always the non breaking space and 0xAD is mostly the soft hyphen, which only shows at line breaks. Other empty fields are either unassigned or the system used isn't able to display them.

External References

• Descriptions and code charts for most ISO 8859 standards are found in "ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup": http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jmo/czyborra_index.html

• ECMA standards, which in intent correspond exactly to the ISO/IEC 8859 character set standards, can be found at:
  • Standard ECMA-94: 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4 2nd edition (June 1986)
  • Standard ECMA-113: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet 3rd edition (December 1999)
  • Standard ECMA-114: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Arabic Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
  • Standard ECMA-118: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Greek Alphabet (December 1986)
  • Standard ECMA-121: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
  • Standard ECMA-128: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 5 2nd edition (December 1999)
  • Standard ECMA-144: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 6 3rd edition (December 2000)

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