The DIN standard DIN 91379: "Characters and defined character sequences in Unicode for the electronic processing of names and data exchange in Europe, with CD-ROM" defines a normative subset of

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, ...

Latin characters The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...

, sequences of base characters and diacritic signs, and special characters for use in names of persons, legal entities, products, addresses etc. The standard defines a normative mapping of Latin letters to base letters A-Z according to the recommendations of

ICAO The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, ) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates the principles and techniques of international air navigation, and fosters the planning and development of international a ...

Languages and scripts supported

The subset supports all official languages of

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...

countries as well as the official languages of

Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its ...

Liechtenstein Liechtenstein (), officially the Principality of Liechtenstein (german: link=no, Fürstentum Liechtenstein), is a German language, German-speaking microstate located in the Alps between Austria and Switzerland. Liechtenstein is a semi-constit ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

, and also the German minority languages. To allow the

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

of names in other

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 fo ...

s to the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...

according to the relevant ISO standards all necessary diacritic signs are provided. In addition to the normative characters the standard defines subsets of extended characters that contain modern

Greek letters The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...

for

Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders wi ...

and

Cyprus Cyprus ; tr, Kıbrıs (), officially the Republic of Cyprus,, , lit: Republic of Cyprus is an island country located south of the Anatolian Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Its continental position is disputed; while it is ...

Cyrillic letters The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...

for

Bulgaria Bulgaria (; bg, България, Bǎlgariya), officially the Republic of Bulgaria,, ) is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern flank of the Balkans, and is bordered by Romania to the north, Serbia and North Macedo ...

and special characters for names of products and legal entities. Conforming applications may support additional characters, however for interface agreements or registers it may be appropriate to support only a final subset of characters and sequences based on this standard. The text of the former standard, DIN SPEC 91379, explanations and lists of characters and sequences as

Excel ExCeL London (an abbreviation for Exhibition Centre London) is an exhibition centre, international convention centre and former hospital in the Custom House area of Newham, East London. It is situated on a site on the northern quay of the ...

and

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

files can be found in ''Koordinierungsstelle für IT-Standards'' (KoSIT). This reference contains also an

XML schema An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constra ...

file with patterns to check conformance of text to subsets defined in this standard. Lists of characters and sequences of DIN SPEC 91379 and DIN 91379 as

plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a limit ...

files are available via GitHub in ''DIN 91379 Characters and Sequences''. The DIN contains few additional characters and sequences.

Compliance

To be compliant to this norm, it is required to * support all normative letters and sequences at all processing stages, * use the encoding

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 e ...

at interfaces, and * normalize the characters according to Unicode normalization form C ( NFC). Continuous text is not in the scope of this norm. The compliance to this standard will be mandatory for German authorities and organisations in the exchange of data between authorities or with citizens and business from Nov 1, 2024. The architecture guideline for German federal IT demands the usage of the standard DIN SPEC 91379. Current results of the standardization process include the specification DIN SPEC 91379 in March 2019 and final DIN standard in August 2022. Efforts are being made to further develop it into a European CEN standard.

Software supporting DIN 91379

* Free Java library for creating and editing PDF supporting DIN 91379: ** OpenPDF * Free Fonts for DIN 91379 ** Noto Fonts, see also issue "Combining comma above right" at wrong position

References

External links

* * * {{cite web, url=https://www.cit.de/presse/80-tagen-um-die-welt-unicode-der-verwaltung, title=In 80 Tagen um die Welt: Unicode in der Verwaltung, date=19 November 2020, trans-title=In 80 days around the world: Unicode in the administration, publisher=cit GmbH, access-date=2022-03-20, language=de 91379 Unicode Character sets Latin script