ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

and IEC series of standards for 8-bit

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...

s. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as

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 1987 ...

, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12. The ISO working group maintaining this series of standards has been disbanded. ISO/IEC 8859 parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 were originally

Ecma International Ecma International () is a Nonprofit organization, nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to ...

standard ECMA-94.

Introduction

While the bit patterns of the 95 printable

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

characters are sufficient to exchange information in modern English, most other languages that use

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

s need additional symbols not covered by ASCII. ISO/IEC 8859 sought to remedy this problem by utilizing the eighth bit in an 8-bit

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

to allow positions for another 96 printable characters. Early encodings were limited to 7 bits because of restrictions of some data transmission protocols, and partially for historical reasons. However, more characters were needed than could fit in a single 8-bit character encoding, so several mappings were developed, including at least ten suitable for various Latin alphabets. The ISO/IEC 8859 standard parts only define printable characters, although they explicitly set apart the byte ranges 0x00–1F and 0x7F–9F as "combinations that do not represent graphic characters" (i.e. which are reserved for use as

control character In computing and telecommunications, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point in a character encoding, character set that does not represent a written Character (computing), character or symbol. They are used as in-ba ...

s) in accordance with ISO/IEC 4873; they were designed to be used in conjunction with a separate standard defining the control functions associated with these bytes, such as ISO 6429 or ISO 6630. To this end a series of encodings registered with the

IANA The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet P ...

add the C0 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 0 to 31) from

ISO 646 ISO/IEC 646 ''Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange'', is an International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC standard in the ...

and the C1 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 128 to 159) from ISO 6429, resulting in full 8-bit character maps with most, if not all, bytes assigned. These sets have ISO-8859-''n'' as their preferred

MIME A mime artist, or simply mime (from Greek language, Greek , , "imitator, actor"), is a person who uses ''mime'' (also called ''pantomime'' outside of Britain), the acting out of a story through body motions without the use of speech, as a the ...

name or, in cases where a preferred MIME name is not specified, their canonical name. Many people use the terms ISO/IEC 8859-''n'' and ISO-8859-''n'' interchangeably.

ISO/IEC 8859-11 ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 11: Latin/Thai alphabet'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 2001. I ...

did not get such a charset assigned, presumably because it was almost identical to TIS 620.

Characters

The ISO/IEC 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not

typography Typography is the art and technique of Typesetting, arranging type to make written language legibility, legible, readability, readable and beauty, appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, Point (typogra ...

; 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

and ISO/IEC 8859 standards, or use

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

instead. An inexact rule based on practical experience states that 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 did not 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 did not get its ''œ'' and ''Œ'' ligatures because they could be typed as 'oe'. Likewise, ''Ÿ'', needed for all-caps text, was dropped as well. Albeit under different codepoints, these three characters were later reintroduced with

ISO/IEC 8859-15 ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1999. ...

in 1999, which also introduced the new

euro sign The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letter E (or epsilon), crossed by ...

character €. Likewise Dutch did not get the ''ĳ'' and ''Ĳ'' letters, because Dutch speakers had become 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 The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the in ...

, considering the shapes with comma beneath to be

glyph variants A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

of the shapes with cedilla. However, the letters with explicit comma below were later added to the Unicode standard and are also in ISO/IEC 8859-16. Most of the ISO/IEC 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages using the Latin script. Others provide non-Latin alphabets:

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

Cyrillic The Cyrillic 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 countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

and Thai. Most of the encodings contain only spacing characters, although the Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic ones do also contain

combining character In digital typography, combining characters are Character (computing), characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritic, diacritical marks (including c ...

s. The standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages ('' CJK''), as their ideographic

writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

s require many thousands of code points. Although it uses Latin based characters, Vietnamese does not fit into 96 positions (without using combining diacritics such as in Windows-1258) either. Each Japanese syllabic alphabet (hiragana or katakana, see

Kana are syllabary, syllabaries used to write Japanese phonology, Japanese phonological units, Mora (linguistics), morae. In current usage, ''kana'' most commonly refers to ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. It can also refer to their ancestor , wh ...

) would fit, as in

JIS X 0201 JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969, was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. The character set was initially known as JIS C 6220 before the JIS category reform. ...

, but like several other alphabets of the world they are not encoded in the ISO/IEC 8859 system.

The parts of ISO/IEC 8859

ISO/IEC 8859 is divided into the following parts: Each part of ISO/IEC 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 of its seven special characters 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

unassigned code points.
new additions in ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003 and ISO/IEC 8859-8:1999 versions, previously unassigned.

Relationship to Unicode and the UCS

Since 1991, the Unicode Consortium has been working with ISO and IEC to develop the

Unicode Standard Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 cha ...

and ISO/IEC 10646: the Universal Character Set (UCS) in tandem. Newer editions of ISO/IEC 8859 express characters in terms of their Unicode/UCS names and the ''U+nnnn'' notation, effectively causing each part of ISO/IEC 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/IEC-8859-1 ( Latin-1). Single-byte character sets including the parts of ISO/IEC 8859 and derivatives of them were favoured 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 Unicode-enabled operating systems became more widespread, ISO/IEC 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 other encodings, when necessary.

Current 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 A working group is a group of experts working together to achieve specified goals. Such groups are domain-specific and focus on discussion or activity around a specific subject area. The term can sometimes refer to an interdisciplinary collab ...

, WG 2, is concentrating on development of Unicode's

Universal Coded Character Set The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of character (computing), characters defined by the international standard International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC ...

. The

WHATWG The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, ...

Encoding Standard, which specifies the character encodings permitted in

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

which compliant browsers must support, includes most parts of ISO/IEC 8859, except for parts 1, 9 and 11, which are instead interpreted as

Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 ( Windows code page 1252) is a legacy single-byte character encoding that is used by default (as the "ANSI code page") in Microsoft Windows throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. Initially ...

, Windows-1254 and Windows-874 respectively. Authors of new pages and the designers of new protocols are instructed to use

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

instead.

Introduction

Characters

The parts of ISO/IEC 8859

Table

Relationship to Unicode and the UCS

Current status

See also

Notes

References

Further reading