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. It is informally referred to as Latin-1. It is generally intended for “Western European” languages (see below for a list).
ISO-8859-1 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. The following other aliases are registered for ISO-8859-1: ISO_8859-1, iso-ir-100, csISOLatin1, latin1, l1, IBM819, CP819.
The Windows-1252 codepage coincides with ISO-8859-1 for all codes except the range 80 to 9F (where the little-used C1 controls are replaced with additional characters).
Coverage
ISO 8859-1 encodes what it refers to as "Latin alphabet no. 1," consisting of 191 characters from the Latin script. This character-encoding scheme is used throughout The Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. It is also commonly used in most standard romanizations of East-Asian languages.
Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following European languages (with a few exceptions due to missing characters, as noted):
- Modern languages with complete coverage of their alphabet
|
- Languages commonly supported with nearly complete coverage of their alphabet
|
- Coverage of punctuation signs and apostrophes
For some languages listed above the correct typographical quotation marks are missing, as only « », " ", and ' ' are included.
Also, this encoding scheme does not provide the correct character for the apostrophe and oriented single high quotation marks, although some texts use the spacing grave accent and spacing acute accent that are both part of ISO 8859-1, instead of the 6-shaped/9-shaped quotations marks or apostrophes (and this works reliably with some font styles where all these characters are displayed as slanted wedge glyphs).
See also: Alphabets derived from the Latin
History
ISO 8859-1 was based on the Multinational Character Set used by Digital Equipment Corporation in the popular VT220 terminal. It was developed within ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturers Association, and published in March 1985 as ECMA-94, by which name it is still sometimes known. The second edition of ECMA-94 (June 1986) also included ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-3, and ISO 8859-4 as part of the specification.
In 1985 Commodore adopted officially for its new AmigaOS operating system ANSI/ISO8859-1 layout for its codepage and all internal operations in order to refer to international approved standards rather than proprietary standards, as it happened in those times with MS-DOS, and Mac OS and thus this standard was also used for manufacturing the keyboard layout of Amiga 1000 computer that was launched in July 1985. All versions of Amiga OS up to 3.1 used ISO8859-1. Since the demise of Commodore International in 1994 all further versions of AmigaOS (3.5, 3.9) continued to have ISO8859-1 codepage set enhanced with Euro Currency character, but without a leading firm capable to impose official standards both Amiga and its clone variants (MorphOS, AROS) did not update officially to ISO 8859-15 neither follow a common approach in the introduction of Euro character in 2001. MorphOS 2.0 and further versions are UNICODE UTF-8 compliant.
In 1992, the IANA registered the character map ISO_8859-1:1987, more commonly known by its preferred MIME name of ISO-8859-1 (note the extra hyphen over ISO 8859-1), a superset of ISO 8859-1, for use on the Internet. This map assigns the C0 and C1 control characters to the code values 00–1F, 7F, and 80–9F. It thus provides for 256 characters via every possible 8-bit value.
ISO-8859-1 is (according to the standards at least) the default encoding of documents delivered via HTTP with a MIME type beginning with "text/". It is the default encoding of the values of certain descriptive HTTP headers, and is the standard encoding used by the X Window System on most Unix machines in locales which use that character set. It was also the basis of the repertoire of characters allowed in HTML 3.2 documents (HTML 4.0, however, is based on Unicode). However, the draft HTML 5 specification requires that documents advertised as ISO-8859-1 actually be parsed with the Windows-1252 encoding.[1]
![[icon]](/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small} | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2008) |
Codepage layout
Similar character sets
ISO-8859-1 was incorporated as the first 256 code points of ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode.
The lower range 20 to 7E (the G0 subset) maps exactly to the same coded G0 subset of the ISO 646 US variant (commonly known as ASCII), whose ISO 2022 standard switch sequence is "ESC ( B". The higher range A0 to FF (the G1 subset) maps exactly to the same subset initiated by the ISO 2022 standard switch sequence "ESC . A".
ISO/IEC 8859-1 is missing some characters for French and Finnish text and the euro sign. In order to provide some of these characters, ISO/IEC 8859-15 was developed as an update of ISO/IEC 8859-1. This required, however, the removal of some infrequently-used characters from ISO/IEC 8859-1, including fraction symbols and letter-free diacritics: ¤, ¦, ¨, ´, ¸, ¼, ½, and ¾.
The popular Windows-1252 character set adds all the missing characters provided by ISO/IEC 8859-15, plus a number of typographic symbols, by replacing the rarely-used C1 controls in the range 80 to 9F. It is very common to mislabel text data with the charset label ISO-8859-1, even though the data is really Windows-1252 encoded. Many web browsers and e-mail clients will interpret ISO-8859-1 control codes as Windows-1252 characters in order to accommodate such mislabeling but it is not standard behaviour and care should be taken to avoid generating these characters in ISO-8859-1 labeled content.
The Apple Macintosh computer introduced a character encoding called Mac Roman, or Mac-Roman, in 1984. It was meant to be suitable for Western European desktop publishing. It is a superset of ASCII, like ISO-8859-1, and has most of the characters that are in ISO-8859-1 but in a totally different arrangement. A later version, registered with IANA as "Macintosh", replaced the generic currency sign ¤ with the euro sign €. The few printable characters that are in ISO 8859-1 but not in this set are often a source of trouble when editing text on websites using older Macintosh browsers (including the last version of Internet Explorer for Mac). However the extra characters that Windows-1252 has in the C1 codepoint range are all supported in MacRoman.
DOS had code page 850, which had all printable characters that ISO-8859-1 had (albeit in a totally different arrangement) plus the most widely used graphic characters from code page 437.
See also
- ISO/IEC 8859-15 – a derivative of ISO-8859-1
- Latin characters in Unicode
- Unicode
- Universal character set
- UTF-8
References
- ^ HTML 5 Draft Recommendation — 12 April 2010, 8.1 Character encodings, retrieved [2010-04-12].
External links
- ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998
- ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1 (draft dated February 12, 1998, published April 15, 1998)
- Standard ECMA-94: 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4 2nd edition (June 1986)
- ISO-IR 100 Right-Hand Part of Latin Alphabet No.1 (February 1, 1986)
- Windows Code pages
- Differences between ANSI, ISO-8859-1 and MacRoman Character Sets
- The Letter Database
- The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup - Roman Czyborra's summary of ISO character sets
| Early telecommunications | |
|---|---|
| ISO/IEC 8859 |
|
| Bibliographic use | |
| National standards | |
| ISO/IEC 2022 | |
| Mac OS Code pages ("scripts") | |
| DOS code pages | |
| IBM AIX code pages | |
| Windows code pages | |
| EBCDIC code pages | |
| DEC terminals (VTx) | |
| Platform specific |
|
| Unicode / ISO/IEC 10646 | |
| TeX typesetting system | |
| Miscellaneous code pages | |
| Control character | |
| Related topics | |
