ISO 8859, more formally ISO/IEC 8859, is a joint ISO and IEC standard for 8-bit character encodings for use by computers. The standard is divided into numbered, separately published parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc., each of which may be informally referred to as a standard in and of itself. There are currently 15 parts. In other languages Iso means the following in other languages: Big in Finnish a Latin transliteration of the Greek ίσος, meaning equal. ... The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is a standards organization dealing with electrical, electronic and related technologies. ... A character encoding is a code that pairs a set of natural language characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. ...

Introduction

While the bit patterns of the 96 printable ASCII characters are sufficient to exchange information in modern English, most other languages that use the Roman alphabet need additional symbols not covered by ASCII, such as ß (German) and å (Swedish and other Nordic languages). ISO 8859 sought to remedy this problem by utilizing the eighth bit in an 8-bit byte in order to allow positions for another 128 characters. (This bit was previously used for data transmission protocol information, or was left unused.) However, more characters were needed than could fit in a single 8-bit character encoding, so several mappings were developed, including at least 10 just to cover the Latin script. There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. ... The ß — Eszett (IPA ) in German or scharfes S (sharp S) if spelled out — is a letter used only in the German alphabet. ... Å, or å, is a letter, representing a vowel, in the Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Walloon and Chamorro alphabets. ... A North Germanic language is any of several Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia, parts of Finland and on the islands west of Scandinavia. ... This article refers to the unit of binary information. ...

Although ISO 8859-n and ISO-8859-n are terms often used interchangeably, the ISO 8859 standard is not the same as the well-known ISO-8859-n character encodings registered by the IANA for use on the Internet. Besides the extra hyphen being present in the IANA-registered names, the encodings differ in that each part of the ISO standard assigns, at most, 191 characters to the byte ranges 32 to 126 and 160 to 255, whereas the corresponding IANA-registered character encoding merges these mappings with the C0 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 0 to 31) and the C1 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 127 to 159), resulting in a full 8-bit character map with most, if not all, bytes assigned.

Characters

The ISO 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not typography; 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 and ISO 8859 standards, or use Unicode instead. Typographic work Typography (from the Greek words typos = form and grapho = write) is the art and technique of selecting and arranging type styles, point sizes, line lengths, line leading, character spacing, and word spacing for typeset applications. ... There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ...

As a rule of thumb, 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 didn't 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 didn't get its œ and Œ ligatures because they could be typed as 'oe'. Ÿ, needed for all-caps text, was left out as well. These characters were, however, included later with ISO 8859-15, which also introduced the new Euro character €. Likewise Dutch did not get the 'ij' and 'IJ' letters, because Dutch speakers had gotten 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, 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 8859-16. ISO 8859-15 is part 15 of ISO 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It is also known as Latin-9, and unofficially as Latin-0 but not as Latin-15. ... The euro (€; ISO 4217 code EUR) is the currency of twelve of the twenty-five nations that form the European Union (and four outside it, as well as Montenegro and Kosovo), which form the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). ... A comma ( , ) is a punctuation mark. ... A cedilla is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritic mark to modify their pronunciation. ... In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... A glyph is a carved figure or character, incised or in relief; a carved pictograph; hence, a pictograph representing a form originally adopted for sculpture, whether carved or painted. ... ISO 8859-16, also known as Latin-10 or South-Eastern European, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ...

Most of the ISO 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages. Others provide non-Roman alphabets: Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. However, the standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages (CJK), as their ideographic writing systems require many thousands of code points. Although it uses Latin based characters, Vietnamese does not fit into 96 positions either; Japanese syllabic Kana scripts, on the other hand, might, but like several other alphabets of the world isn't encoded in the ISO 8859 system. The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language. ... CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which comprise the largest of East Asian languages. ... A writing system, also called a script, is used to visually record a language with symbols. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Romaji ローマ字 Kana is a general term for two types of syllabic Japanese script: hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). ...

The Parts of ISO 8859

ISO 8859 is divided into the following parts:

^[1]—only the IJ/ij (letter IJ) is missing, which is usually represented as IJ.
^[2]—missing characters are in ISO 8859-15.
^[3]—missing Ґ/ґ characters were reintroduced into Ukrainian in 1991. ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. ... Basque (Euskara in Basque) is the language spoken by the Basque people, who live in northern Spain and the adjoining area of southwestern France. ... Catalan (Català, Valencià) is a Romance language understood by as many as 12 million people in portions of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, although the majority of active Catalan speakers are in Spain. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Faroese is a West Nordic or West Scandinavian language spoken by about 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000 in Denmark. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Scottish language may be: Scottish English - the form of the English language used in Scotland. ... Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. ... Swahili (also called Kiswahili; see below for a discussion of the nomenclature) is a Bantu language widely spoken in East Africa. ... The euro (€; ISO 4217 code EUR) is the currency of twelve European Union member states: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. ... In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ... HTTP (for HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the primary method used to convey information on the World Wide Web. ... ISO 8859-2, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-2 or less formally as Latin-2, is part 2 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. ... The euro (€; ISO 4217 code EUR) is the currency of twelve European Union member states: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. ... ISO 8859-3, also known as Latin-3 or South European is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... Esperanto flag Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international language. ... ISO 8859-9, also known as Latin-5 or Turkish, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... ISO 8859-4, also known as Latin-4 or North European, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... Sami is a general name for a group of Finno-Ugric languages spoken in parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, in Northern Europe. ... ISO 8859-5, also known as Cyrillic is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... The Serbian language or Serb language is one of the standard versions of the Central-South Slavic diasystem, formerly (and still frequently) called Serbo-Croatian. ... ISO 8859-6, also known as Arabic, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... Arabic (العربية) is a Semitic language, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language, which is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. ... ISO 8859-7, also known as Greek, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... The Greek language (Greek Ελληνικά, IPA – Hellenic) is an Indo-European language with a documented history of some 3,000 years. ... Monotonic orthography is the simplified way for spelling modern Greek introduced in the 1980s. ... Polytonic orthography for Greek uses a variety of diacritics (πολύ = many + τόνος = accent) to represent aspects of Ancient Greek pronunciation. ... ISO 8859-8, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-8 (but not as Latin-8!), is part 8 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. ISO 8859-8 contains all the Hebrew letters (consonants only, no Hebrew vowel signs). ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... ISO 8859-9, also known as Latin-5 or Turkish, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... Geographic distribution The Kurdish languages or Kurdish dialects are spoken in the region loosely called Kurdistan including Kurdish populations in parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. ... ISO 8859-10, also known as Latin-6, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... ISO 8859-11 is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... The Thai language is the official language of Thailand. ... ISO 8859-12 does not exist as part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... ISO 8859-13, also known as Latin-7 or Baltic Rim, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... ISO 8859-14, also known as Latin-8 or Celtic, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... Goidelic is one of two major divisions of modern-day Celtic languages (the other being Brythonic). ... Breton (Brezhoneg) is a Celtic language spoken by some of the inhabitants of Brittany in France. ... ISO 8859-15 is part 15 of ISO 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It is also known as Latin-9, and unofficially as Latin-0 but not as Latin-15. ... The euro (€; ISO 4217 code EUR) is the currency of twelve European Union member states: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. ... ISO 8859-16, also known as Latin-10 or South-Eastern European, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... The euro (€; ISO 4217 code EUR) is the currency of twelve European Union member states: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. ... IJ (IJ) is a letter from the Dutch alphabet used to represent the diphthong or . ...

Each part of ISO 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 its seven special chars 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 isn't able to display them. The binary or base-two numeral system is a system for representing numbers in which a radix of two is used; that is, each digit in a binary numeral may have either of two different values. ... The octal numeral system is the base-8 number system, and uses the digits 0 to 7. ... Decimal, or less commonly, denary, usually refers to the base 10 numeral system. ... In mathematics and computer science, hexadecimal or simply hex is a numeral system with a radix or base of 16 usually written using the symbols 0–9 and A–F or a–f. ...

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 to develop the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646: the Universal Character Set (UCS) in tandem. This pair of standards was created to unify the ISO 8859 character repertoire, among others, by assigning each character, initially, to a 16-bit code value, with some code values left unassigned. Over time, their models adapted to map characters to abstract numeric code points rather than fixed bit-width values, so that more code points and encoding methods could be supported. In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... The Universal Character Set is a character encoding that is defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646. ...

Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 currently assign about 100,000 characters to a code space consisting of over a million code points, and they define several standard encodings that are capable of representing every available code point. The standard encodings of Unicode and the UCS use sequences of one to four 8-bit code values (UTF-8), sequences of one or two 16-bit code values (UTF-16), or one 32-bit code value (UTF-32 or UCS-4). There is also an older encoding that uses one 16-bit code value (UCS-2), capable of representing one-seventeenth of the available code points. Of these encoding forms, only UTF-8's byte sequences are in a fixed order; the others are subject to platform-dependent byte ordering issues that may be addressed via special codes or indicated via out-of-band means. UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a lossless, variable-length character encoding for Unicode created by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. ... In computing, UTF-16 is a 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format, a character encoding form that provides a way to represent a series of abstract characters from Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 as a series of 16-bit words suitable for storage or transmission via data networks. ... UTF-32 is a method of encoding Unicode characters, using a fixed amount of 32 bits for each character. ... UTF-32 is a method of encoding Unicode characters, using a fixed amount of 32 bits for each character. ... The Universal Character Set is a character encoding that is defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646. ...

Newer editions of ISO 8859 express characters in terms of their Unicode/UCS names and the U+nnnn notation, effectively causing each part of ISO 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-8859-1.

ISO 8859 was favored 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 the relative cost, in computing resources, of using more than one byte per character began to diminish, programming languages and operating systems added native support for Unicode alongside their system of code pages. As Unicode-enabled operating systems became more widespread, ISO 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 the simpler encodings, when necessary. Code page is the traditional IBM term used for a specific character encoding table: a mapping in which a sequence of bits, usually a single octet representing integer values 0 through 255, is associated with a specific character. ...

Development 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. The standard is not currently being updated, as the Subcommittee's only remaining Working Group, WG 2, is concentrating on development of ISO/IEC 10646. The Universal Character Set is a character encoding that is defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646. ...

References

• Published versions of each part of ISO/IEC 8859 are available, for a fee, from the ISO catalogue site (http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/stdsdevelopment/tc/tclist/TechnicalCommitteeStandardsListPage.TechnicalCommitteeStandardsList?COMMID=23) and from the ANSI eStandards Store (http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/find.asp?find_spec=8859).

• PDF versions of the final drafts of some parts of ISO/IEC 8859 as submitted for review & publication by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 are available at the WG 3 web site (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG3/):
  • ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n411.pdf) - 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 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n413.pdf) - 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 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/open/02n3329.pdf) - 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 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n415.pdf) - 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 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/open/02n3333.pdf) - 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 Dec 15, 2001)
  • ISO/IEC 8859-13:1998 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n451.pdf) - 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 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n404.pdf) - 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 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/open/02n3389.pdf) - 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 standards, which in intent correspond exactly to the ISO/IEC 8859 character set standards, can be found at:
  • Standard ECMA-94 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-094.htm): 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4 2nd edition (June 1986)
  • Standard ECMA-113 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-113.htm): 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet 3rd edition (December 1999)
  • Standard ECMA-114 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-114.htm): 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Arabic Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
  • Standard ECMA-118 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-118.htm): 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Greek Alphabet (December 1986)
  • Standard ECMA-121 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-121.htm): 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
  • Standard ECMA-128 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-128.htm): 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 5 2nd edition (December 1999)
  • Standard ECMA-144 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-144.htm): 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 6 3rd edition (December 2000)

• ISO/IEC 8859-1 to Unicode mapping tables (ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO8859) as plain text files are at the Unicode FTP site.

• Informal descriptions and code charts for most ISO 8859 standards are available in ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup (http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html) (Mirror) (http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jmo/czyborra_index.html)