ISO 8859 (Latin) character encoding

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(Doorverwezen vanaf Latin1 vs. Latin3)
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Background

ASCII

As many stories around computer character sets, this story start with ASCII - the American Standard Code for Information Interchange:

  • Actually a bunch of character sets precided ASCII, especially telegraph codes, but let's not get distracted here
  • ASCII is a 7-bit coding system. The 8th bit was used for parity. Additionally, there was a time that it wasn't common to group bits in groups of 8, so maybe this is even from before that time
  • With 7-bit encoding, there are only 128 code points
  • Of these 128 code points, only 95 were used for printable characters

MCS & ECMA-94

  • The Multinational Character Set (DMCS or MCS) was a character set developed in 1983 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use in its VT220 terminal. It was an extention to 8-bit of ASCII.
  • On its turn, MCS was the inspiration for ECMA-94

ISO/IEC 8859

  • ISO/IEC-8859 (ISO-8859 for short) is a series of 8-bit character encodings, consting of 15 parts, coded ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-2, etc
  • There is also ISO 8859-16. Maybe that's a later update to include the euro symbol?
  • Parts 1 to 4, were based on ECMA-94.

Parts of ISO 8859

See the table here for a description of all 16 parts and how different parts have different names, including Latin-1, Latin-4, Latin/Cyrillic and Latin-10 South-Eastern European (part 16).

Latin-1

ISO 8859-1, ISO-8859 part 1 or Latin-1, was the default coding for HTML. In HTML 5, this has been replaced by encoding Windows-1252. It's quite interchangeable with ISO 8859-1.

Latin-1 vs Latin-3

I expected that Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) and Latin3 (ISO-8859-3) would be so close that the difference would be negligible. Nope! See this example, of a French text in Latin1

French text encoded in Latin1. Note characters 'é', '«' and '»'
French text encoded in Latin3. Note the missing characters 'é', '«' and '»'

Sources

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