The German standard

DIN DIN or Din or din may refer to: People and language * Din (name), people with the name * Dīn, an Arabic word with three general senses: judgment, custom, and religion from which the name originates * Dinka language (ISO 639 code: din), spoken by ...

66303 is a character set standard, which is used for

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to Graphics, graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of Language, human language, allowing them to be Data storage, stored, Data communication, transmi ...

in computer systems. The standard DIN 66303 bears the title "Information Technology: 8-Bit-Code" and was established in November 1986 (DIN 66303:1986-11). The most recent edition is from June 2000 (DIN 66303:2000-06). The character set of the 2000 edition (DIN 66303:2000-06) corresponds in layout and repertoire to the international standard

ISO/IEC 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in ...

. The still often-used forerunner DIN 66303:1986-11 specified two

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some co ...

s, the ''General Reference Version of the 8-Bit-Code (', ARV8)'' and the ''German Reference Version of the 8-Bit-Code (', DRV8)''. DRV8 is an extension of DIN 66003 (the German adaptation of

ISO/IEC 646 ISO/IEC 646 is a set of ISO/IEC standards, described as ''Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange'' and developed in cooperation with ASCII at least since 1964. Since its first edition in 1 ...

) with European characters, whereas ARV8 represents a re-arrangement of the DIN 66003 characters to their internationally used (

ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1 ...

DEC MCS The Multinational Character Set (DMCS or MCS) is a character encoding created in 1983 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use in the popular VT220 computer terminal, terminal. It was an 8-bit extension of ASCII that added accented character ...

) code points.

Tables for the 1986 edition

DIN 66303:1986-11 – German Reference Version of the 8-bit Code (DRV8)

The DRV8 code corresponds to

with certain characters swapped, such as to make it an extension of DIN 66003 as opposed to of ASCII.

DIN 66303:1986-11 – General Reference Version of the 8-Bit-Code (ARV8)

The name "ARV8" is associated with

without rearrangement. Shown below is the common subset of the Latin parts of ISO 8859, which corresponds to the definition of ARV8 in the 1986 edition of DIN 66303.

References

{{Reflist Character encoding ISO/IEC 8859 66303