ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint
ISO and
IEC series of standards for 8-bit
character encoding
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...
s. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as
ISO/IEC 8859-1,
ISO/IEC 8859-2
ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. I ...
, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned
ISO/IEC 8859-12
ISO/IEC 8859-12 would have been part 12 of the ISO/IEC 8859 character encoding standard series.
ISO 8859-12 was originally proposed to support the Celtic languages. ISO 8859-12 was later slated for Latin/Devanagari, but this was abandoned in 1997 ...
. The ISO working group maintaining this series of standards has been disbanded.
ISO/IEC 8859 parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 were originally
Ecma International
Ecma International () is a nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organizatio ...
standard ECMA-94.
Introduction
While the bit patterns of the 95
printable ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
characters are sufficient to exchange information in modern
English, most other languages that use
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
s need additional symbols not covered by ASCII. ISO/IEC 8859 sought to remedy this problem by utilizing the eighth bit in an 8-bit
byte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
to allow positions for another 96 printable characters. Early encodings were limited to 7 bits because of restrictions of some data transmission protocols, and partially for historical reasons. However, more characters were needed than could fit in a single 8-bit character encoding, so several mappings were developed, including at least ten suitable for various Latin alphabets.
The ISO/IEC 8859 standard parts only define printable characters, although they explicitly set apart the byte ranges 0x00–1F and 0x7F–9F as "combinations that do not represent graphic characters" (i.e. which are reserved for use as
control characters) in accordance with
ISO/IEC 4873; they were designed to be used in conjunction with a separate standard defining the control functions associated with these bytes, such as
ISO 6429 or
ISO 6630. To this end a series of encodings registered with the
IANA
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Interne ...
add the
C0 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 0 to 31) from
ISO 646 and the
C1 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 128 to 159) from ISO 6429, resulting in full 8-bit character maps with most, if not all, bytes assigned. These sets have ISO-8859-''n'' as their preferred
MIME
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Messa ...
name or, in cases where a preferred MIME name is not specified, their canonical name. Many people use the terms ISO/IEC 8859-''n'' and ISO-8859-''n'' interchangeably.
ISO/IEC 8859-11 did not get such a charset assigned, presumably because it was almost identical to
TIS 620.
Characters
The ISO/IEC 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not
typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), an ...
; the standard omits 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
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
and ISO/IEC 8859 standards, or use
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
instead.
An inexact rule based on practical experience states that 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 did not 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 did not get its ''œ'' and ''Œ'' ligatures because they could be typed as 'oe'. Likewise, ''Ÿ'', needed for all-caps text, was dropped as well.
Albeit under different codepoints, these three characters were later reintroduced with
ISO/IEC 8859-15 in 1999, which also introduced the new
euro sign
The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consi ...
character €. Likewise Dutch did not get the ''ij'' and ''IJ'' letters, because Dutch speakers had become used to typing these as two letters instead.
Romanian did not initially get its ''Ș''/''ș'' and ''Ț''/''ț'' (
with comma) letters, because these letters were initially unified with ''Ş''/''ş'' and ''Ţ''/''ţ'' (
with cedilla) by the
Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intent ...
, considering the shapes with comma beneath to be
glyph variants of the shapes with cedilla. However, the letters with explicit comma below were later added to the Unicode standard and are also in
ISO/IEC 8859-16.
Most of the ISO/IEC 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages using the Latin script. Others provide non-Latin alphabets:
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
,
Cyrillic,
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
,
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...
and
Thai. Most of the encodings contain only
spacing characters
In ISO/IEC 646 (commonly known as ASCII) and related standards including ISO 8859 and Unicode, a graphic character is any character intended to be written, printed, or otherwise displayed in a form that can be read by humans. In other words, it i ...
, although the Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic ones do also contain
combining characters
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents).
Unicode al ...
.
The standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages (''
CJK''), as their ideographic
writing system
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable for ...
s require many thousands of code points. Although it uses Latin based characters,
Vietnamese does not fit into 96 positions (without using combining diacritics such as in
Windows-1258) either. Each Japanese syllabic alphabet (hiragana or katakana, see
Kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most pr ...
) would fit, as in
JIS X 0201, but like several other alphabets of the world they are not encoded in the ISO/IEC 8859 system.
The parts of ISO/IEC 8859
ISO/IEC 8859 is divided into the following parts:
Each part of ISO/IEC 8859 is designed to support languages that often borrow from each other, so the characters needed by each language are usually accommodated by a single part. However, there are some characters and language combinations that are not accommodated without transcriptions. Efforts were made to make conversions as smooth as possible. For example, German has all of its seven special characters at the same positions in all Latin variants (1–4, 9, 10, 13–16), and in many positions the characters only differ in the diacritics between the sets. In particular, variants 1–4 were designed jointly, and have the property that every encoded character appears either at a given position or not at all.
Table
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 is not able to display them.
There are new additions as
ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003 and
ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 versions. LRM stands for
left-to-right mark (U+200E) and RLM stands for
right-to-left mark (U+200F).
Relationship to Unicode and the UCS
Since 1991, the Unicode Consortium has been working with ISO and IEC to develop the
Unicode Standard
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
and
ISO/IEC 10646: the Universal Character Set (UCS) in tandem. Newer editions of ISO/IEC 8859 express characters in terms of their Unicode/UCS names and the ''U+nnnn'' notation, effectively causing each part of ISO/IEC 8859 to be a Unicode/UCS character encoding scheme that maps a very small subset of the UCS to single 8-bit bytes. The first 256 characters in Unicode and the UCS are identical to those in ISO/IEC-8859-1 (
Latin-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 ...
).
Single-byte character sets including the parts of ISO/IEC 8859 and derivatives of them were favoured throughout the 1990s, having the advantages of being well-established and more easily implemented in software: the equation of one byte to one character is simple and adequate for most single-language applications, and there are no combining characters or variant forms. As Unicode-enabled operating systems became more widespread, ISO/IEC 8859 and other legacy encodings became less popular. While remnants of ISO 8859 and single-byte character models remain entrenched in many operating systems, programming languages, data storage systems, networking applications, display hardware, and end-user application software, most modern computing applications use Unicode internally, and rely on conversion tables to map to and from other encodings, when necessary.
Current status
The ISO/IEC 8859 standard was maintained by ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 2, Working Group 3 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3). In June 2004, WG 3 disbanded, and maintenance duties were transferred to
SC 2 SC2 may refer to:
*
*''South Carolina Highway 2'', a state route in Cayce, South Carolina
*, a United States Navy submarine chaser commissioned in 1918 and sold in 1930
*'' Saturn SC2'', a compact sport coupe car
* Convoy SC 2, an Allied trade co ...
. The standard is not currently being updated, as the Subcommittee's only remaining
working group
A working group, or working party, is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. The groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdis ...
, WG 2, is concentrating on development of Unicode's
Universal Coded Character Set
The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/ IEC 10646, ''Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)'' (plus amendments to that standard), ...
.
The
WHATWG
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, ...
Encoding Standard, which specifies the character encodings permitted in
HTML5
HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HT ...
which compliant browsers must support,
includes most parts of ISO/IEC 8859,
except for parts 1, 9 and 11, which are instead interpreted as
Windows-1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 ( code page 1252) is a single-byte character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows for English and many European languages including Spanish, French, and German.
It ...
,
Windows-1254 and
Windows-874
ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 11: Latin/Thai alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 2001. ...
respectively.
Authors of new pages and the designers of new protocols are instructed to use
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''.
UTF-8 is capable of ...
instead.
See also
*
List of computer character sets
This list provides an inventory of character coding standards mainly before modern standards like ISO/IEC 646 etc. Some of these standards have been deeply involved in historic events that still have consequences. One notable example of this is th ...
*
Number Forms
Number Forms is a Unicode block containing Unicode compatibility characters that have specific meaning as numbers, but are constructed from other characters. They consist primarily of vulgar fractions and Roman numerals. In addition to the cha ...
*
RPL character set (An ISO/IEC 8859-1 superset on HP calculators, referred to as "ECMA-94" as well)
*
DEC Multinational Character Set (MCS)
*
DEC National Replacement Character Set
The National Replacement Character Set (NRCS) was a feature supported by later models of Digital's (DEC) computer terminal systems, starting with the VT200 series in 1983. NRCS allowed individual characters from one character set to be replaced b ...
(NRCS)
Notes
References
* Published versions of each part of ISO/IEC 8859 are available, for a fee, from th
ISO catalogue siteand from th
IEC Webstore
* PDF versions of the final drafts of some parts of ISO/IEC 8859 as submitted to the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 for review & publication are available at th
WG 3 web site
*
ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1 ''(draft dated February 12, 1998, published April 15, 1998)''
*
ISO/IEC 8859-4:1998- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 4: Latin alphabet No. 4 ''(draft dated February 12, 1998, published July 1, 1998)''
*
ISO/IEC 8859-7:1999- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet ''(draft dated June 10, 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003, published October 10, 2003)''
*
ISO/IEC 8859-10:1998- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 10: Latin alphabet No. 6 ''(draft dated February 12, 1998, published July 15, 1998)''
*
ISO/IEC 8859-11:1999- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 11: Latin/Thai character set ''(draft dated June 22, 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001, published 15 December 2001)''
*
ISO/IEC 8859-13:1998- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 13: Latin alphabet No. 7 ''(draft dated April 15, 1998, published October 15, 1998)''
*
ISO/IEC 8859-15:1998- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9 ''(draft dated August 1, 1997; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, published March 15, 1999)''
*
ISO/IEC 8859-16:2000- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 16: Latin alphabet No. 10 ''(draft dated November 15, 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-16:2001, published July 15, 2001)''
*
ECMA
Ecma International () is a nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organizatio ...
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)''
*
8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet ''3rd edition (December 1999)''
*
8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Arabic Alphabet ''2nd edition (December 2000)''
*
8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Greek Alphabet ''(December 1986)''
*
8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet ''2nd edition (December 2000)''
*
8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 5 ''2nd edition (December 1999)''
*
8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 6 ''3rd edition (December 2000)''
* ISO/IEC 8859-1 to Unicod
mapping tablesas plain text files are at the Unicode FTP site.
* Informal descriptions and code charts for most ISO/IEC 8859 standards are available i
{{DEFAULTSORT:ISO IEC 8859
Character sets
Ecma standards
#08859