ANSEL, the American National Standard for Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use, was a

character set 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 ...

used in text encoding. It provided a table of coded values for the representation of characters of the extended Latin alphabet in machine-readable form for thirty-five languages written in the Latin alphabet and for fifty-one romanized languages. ANSEL adds 63 graphic characters 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 ...

, including 29

combining diacritic In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode als ...

characters. The initial revision of ANSEL was released in 1985, and before 1993 it was registered as Registration #231 in the ISO International Register of Coded Character Sets to be Used with Escape Sequences. The standard was reaffirmed in 2003 although it has been administratively withdrawn by

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...

effective 14 February 2013. The requirement of hardware capable of overprinting accents doomed this from ever becoming a popular extended ASCII.

Code page layout

The following table shows ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1993 (R2003). Non-ASCII characters are shown with their

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, wh ...

code point. A combining diacritic ''precedes'' the spacing character on which it should be superimposed (in Unicode the combining diacritic is ''after'' the base character).

Use

GEDCOM

The

GEDCOM GEDCOM ( ), complete name FamilySearch GEDCOM, is a ''de facto'' open file format specification to store genealogical data, and import or export it between compatible genealogy software. GEDCOM is an acronym standing for ''Genealogical Data Comm ...

specification for exchanging

genealogical Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kin ...

data refers to ANSEL (ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1985) as a valid text encoding for GEDCOM files and extends it with additional characters which are shown in the following table.

MARC21

The Extended Latin character set from MARC 21 is synchronized with ANSEL but additionally supports the eszett (ß) character at C7 and the euro sign (€) at C8.

References

External links

National Information Standards Organization (NISO)American National Standards Institute (ANSI)ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1985ANSI/NISO Z39.47-1993 (R2003)

ISO-IR 231
{{character encoding American Library Association Character sets