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The RPL character set is an 8-bit character set and encoding used by most RPL
calculator An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics. The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-sized ...
s manufactured by
Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
as well as by the HP 82240B thermo printer. It is sometimes referred to simply as "ECMA-94" in documentation, although it is for the most part a
superset In mathematics, set ''A'' is a subset of a set ''B'' if all elements of ''A'' are also elements of ''B''; ''B'' is then a superset of ''A''. It is possible for ''A'' and ''B'' to be equal; if they are unequal, then ''A'' is a proper subset o ...
of
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 ...
/
ECMA-94 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12. ...
in terms of printable characters, and it differs from ISO/IEC 8859-1 by using displayable characters rather than control characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F range of code points.


Overview

In 1986, the ''original'' series of RPL calculators ( HP-28 series) as well as the HP 82240A
thermal printer Thermal printing (or direct thermal printing) is a digital printing process which produces a printed image by passing paper with a thermochromic coating, commonly known as thermal paper, over a print head consisting of tiny electrically heate ...
used a modified variant of the
HP Roman-8 In computing HP Roman is a family of character sets consisting of HP Roman Extension, HP Roman-8, HP Roman-9 and several variants. Originally introduced by Hewlett-Packard around 1978, revisions and adaptations were published several times up t ...
character set, of which characters above 147 could not be displayed on the calculator, only be printed. This changed with the introduction of the HP 82240B printer in 1989 and the HP 48 series in 1990, which came with a new character set now based on ECMA 94 / ISO 8859-1 instead of HP Roman-8, but with the control codes in the range 128 to 159 (0x80 to 0x9F) being replaced by additional displayable characters. Compared to ISO 8859-1, code point 127 (0x7F) showed a medium shaded gray box like in the former HP Roman-8 based character set. Code points 131 (0x83) to 142 (0x8E) were also taken over from the former HP Roman-8 based character set. In addition to this, code point 31 (0x1F) was used for ellipsis ( ) and code points 169 (0xA9) and 174 (0xAE) showed ambiguous glyphs which could be viewed as inverse circled number or copyright symbol ( ©) and as or
registered trademark The registered trademark symbol, , is a typographic symbol that provides notice that the preceding word or symbol is a trademark or service mark that has been registered with a national trademark office. A trademark is a symbol, word, or wor ...
symbol ( ®), respectively. This ''first version'' of the character set also had a
non-breaking space In word processing and digital typesetting, a non-breaking space, , also called NBSP, required space, hard space, or fixed space (though it is not of fixed width), is a space character that prevents an automatic line break at its position. In ...
at position 160 (0xA0). Translation from HP-48 to HP-28 character set: In a ''revision'' of this character set in 1999, code point 160 (0xA0) was redefined to hold the
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 consists ...
(€) in the
HP 49/50 series The HP 49/50 series are Hewlett-Packard (HP) manufactured graphing calculators. They are the successors of the popular HP 48 series. There are five calculators in the 49/50 series of HP graphing calculators. These calculators have both ...
(including the HP 48gII), now deviating from ISO 8859-1. Code points 169 (0xA9) and 174 (0xAE) were now clearly defined as holding the copyright ( ©) and
registered trademark The registered trademark symbol, , is a typographic symbol that provides notice that the preceding word or symbol is a trademark or service mark that has been registered with a national trademark office. A trademark is a symbol, word, or wor ...
( ®) symbols in compliance with ISO 8859-1, whereas the corresponding glyphs still resembled the inverse circled numbers more. The last calculator supporting this variant of the character set was the
HP 50g The HP 49/50 series are Hewlett-Packard (HP) manufactured graphing calculators. They are the successors of the popular HP 48 series. There are five calculators in the 49/50 series of HP graphing calculators. These calculators have both ...
introduced in 2006 and discontinued in 2015. In a parallel development, the HP 38G also used the HP 48 series' character set internally. Starting with the
HP 39G HP 39/40 series are graphing calculators from Hewlett-Packard, the successors of HP 38G. The series consists of six calculators, which all have algebraic entry modes, and can perform numeric analysis together with varying degrees of symbolic ...
in 2000, the superscript 3 ( ³) at code point 179 (0xB3) was replaced by a superscript -1 (−1) in the HP 39/40 series (except for the HP 39gII, which started to 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, whic ...
). Code point 160 (0xA0) was also changed to the
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 consists ...
(€) in this ''third variant'' of the character set. The last calculator supporting this variant of the character set was the
HP 40gs HP 39/40 series are graphing calculators from Hewlett-Packard, the successors of HP 38G. The series consists of six calculators, which all have algebraic entry modes, and can perform numeric analysis together with varying degrees of symbolic ...
introduced in 2006 and discontinued around 2011. Hewlett-Packard never defined an official Unicode translation, hence several variants evolved in the community, differing in code points 31 (0x1F), 127 (0x7F), 128 (0x80), 129 (0x81), 133 (0x85), 134 (0x86), 158 (0x9E), 160 (0xA0), 169 (0xA9), 174 (0xAE), 178 (0xB3), 181 (0xB5) and 223 (0xDF). The fact that the Unicode equivalent for x-bar at code point 129 (0x81) is a combination of two characters (x̅) could cause problems in translations, therefore it was suggested to use U+0101 (ā) instead. Characters which cannot be reasonably transcoded should be mapped to code point 127 (0x7F), similar to what the calculators do when communicating with older printers like the HP 82240A. Since the calculators allow fonts to be redefined (using FONT→, →FONT, MINIFONT→, →MINIFONT) other codepages can be emulated for as long as symbols which are available on the keyboard or are otherwise associated with specific functionality by the calculator aren't replaced by unrelated symbols.


Code page layout

The following table shows the HP RPL character set. Each character is shown with a potential
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, whic ...
equivalent in the tooltip. Where special HP TIO codes are defined to enter the character, they are given as well. The other characters can be entered using the \nnn TIO code syntax with nnn being a three-digit
decimal number The decimal numeral system (also called the base-ten positional numeral system and denary or decanary) is the standard system for denoting integer and non-integer numbers. It is the extension to non-integer numbers of the Hindu–Arabic numeral ...
. , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


See also

* HP trigraphs *
Western Latin character sets (computing) Several binary representations of 8-bit character sets for common Western European languages are compared in this article. These encodings were designed for representation of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Dani ...
* Hewlett-Packard calculator character sets


Notes


References


Further reading

* {{character encoding Calculator character sets