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

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 ...

introduced in 1985 by

Lotus Development Corporation Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

. It is based on the 1983 DEC Multinational Character Set (MCS) for

VT220 The VT220 is a computer terminal introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in November 1983. The VT240 added monochrome ReGIS vector graphics support to the base model, while the VT241 did the same in color. The 200 series replaced the s ...

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 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 ...

(Latin-1) character set of 1987. LICS was first introduced as the character set of

Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2 Lotus may refer to: Plants *Lotus (plant), various botanical taxa commonly known as lotus, particularly: **Lotus (genus), ''Lotus'' (genus), a genus of terrestrial plants in the family Fabaceae **Lotus flower, a symbolically important aquatic As ...

for DOS in 1985. It is also utilized by 2.01,

2.2 The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the world's governing body in the sport of bicycle racing, classifies races according to a rating scale. The rating is represented by a code made of two or three parts and indicates both the type or style ...

, 2.3 and 2.4 as well as by

Symphony A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning co ...

. 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 (LMBCS) introduced by Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 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 sequences to ease character input beyond the Alt Numpad input method.

References

''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