The Lotus International Character Set (LICS) is a proprietary single-byte

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 ...

introduced in 1985 by Lotus Development Corporation. It is based on the 1983

DEC Multinational Character Set 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 terminal. It was an 8-bit extension of ASCII that added accented characters, currency symbols ...

(MCS) for VT220 terminals. As such, LICS is also similar to two other descendants of MCS, the

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. ...

character set of 1985 and the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set of 1987. LICS was first introduced as the character set of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2 for

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

in 1985. It is also utilized by 2.01, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 as well as by Symphony. It was also utilized in a number of third-party spreadsheet products emulating the file format. LICS was superseded by the

Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set The Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set (LMBCS) is a proprietary multi-byte character encoding originally conceived in 1988 at Lotus Development Corporation with input from Bob Balaban and others. Created around the same time and addressing some of the ...

(LMBCS) introduced by

Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles i ...

in 1989.

Character set

Codepoints 20_hex (32) to 7F_hex (127) are identical to

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 ...

(as well as to LMBCS). For some characters the table also lists dedicated Lotus 1-2-3

compose key sequence A compose key (sometimes called multi key) is a key on a computer keyboard that indicates that the following (usually 2 or more) keystrokes trigger the insertion of an alternate character, typically a precomposed character or a symbol. For insta ...

s to ease character input beyond the

Alt Numpad input On personal computers with numeric keypads that use Microsoft operating systems, such as Windows operating system, Windows, many Character (computing), characters that do not have a dedicated key combination on the Keyboard (computer), keyboard m ...

method.

References

and Notes 2.1 ''Character Translation File'' (CTF) LICS850.CTF and the Notes 3.0 ''Country Language Services'' (CLS) file L_LICS.CLS contain LICS character translation information. * (NB. Temporarily left here for quick reference, but contains somewhat confused info.) *https://sourceforge.net/p/libwps/code/ci/master/tree/src/lib/libwps_tools_win.cpp (Contains a LICS to Unicode conversion routine, which, however, is buggy) {{Character encodings, state=collapsed Computer-related introductions in 1985 Character encoding Character sets Lotus Software software

Character set

See also

References

Further reading