ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, 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-2". It is generally intended for Central[1] or "Eastern European" languages that are written in the Latin script. Note that ISO/IEC 8859-2 is very different from code page 852 (MS-DOS Latin 2, PC Latin 2) which is also referred to as "Latin-2" in Czech and Slovak regions.[2]Code page 912 is an extension.
ISO-8859-2 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. 0.2% of all web pages use ISO 8859-2 in June 2016.[3] Microsoft has assigned code page 28592 a.k.a. Windows-28592 to ISO-8859-2 in Windows. IBM assigned Code page 1111 to ISO 8859-2.
Codepage 1250 a.k.a. Windows-1250 has many of the same characters but in a different arrangement.
These code values can be used for the following languages:
It can also be used for Romanian, but it is not well suited for that language, due to lacking letters s and t with commas below, although it provides s and t with similar-looking cedillas. These letters were unified in the first versions of the Unicode standard, meaning that the appearance with cedilla or with a comma was treated as a glyph choice rather than as separate characters; fonts intended for use with Romanian should therefore, in theory, have characters with a comma below at those code points.
Microsoft did not really provide such fonts for computers sold in Romania. Still, ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250 (with the same problem) have been heavily used for Romanian. Unicode subsequently disunified the comma variants from the cedilla variants, and has since taken the lead for web pages, which however often have s and t with cedilla anyway. Unicode notes as of 2014[citation needed] that disunifying the letters with comma below was a mistake, causing corruptions of Romanian data: pre-existing data and input methods would still contain the older cedilla codepoints, complicating text searching.
Code page layout
In the following table characters are shown together with their corresponding Unicode code points.
