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ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, 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 standard ECMA-94.

Introduction

While the bit patterns of the 95 printable ASCII characters are sufficient to exchange information in modern English, most other languages that use Latin alphabets 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 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 characters) 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 add the C0 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 0 to 31) from ISO 646 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 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 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; 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 ASCII and ISO/IEC 8859 standards, or use Unicode 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 in 1999, which also introduced the new euro sign 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, considering the shapes with comma beneath to be glyph variants 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, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. Most of the encodings contain only spacing characters, although the Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic ones do also contain combining characters.

The standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages (CJK), as their ideographic writing systems 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) would fit, as in JIS X 0201, 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 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, WG 2, is concentrating on development of Unicode's Universal Coded Character Set.

The WHATWG Encoding Standard, which specifies the character encodings permitted in HTML5 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-1254 and Windows-874 respectively. Authors of new pages and the designers of new protocols are instructed to use UTF-8 instead.

See also

• List of information system character sets
• Number Forms
• RPL character set (an ISO/IEC 8859-1 superset on HP calculators, referred to as "ECMA-94" as well)
• DEC Multinational Character Set (MCS)
• DEC National Replacement Character Set (NRCS)

Notes

1. Missing several accented vowels including Ǿ and ǿ. These can be replaced with non-accented vowels at the cost of increased ambiguity.
2. The ISO 8859 encodings treat IJ as a digraph. Some other encodings treat it as a letter.
3. ^ Missing characters are in ISO/IEC 8859-15.
4. The 1985 edition includes only a version of ISO-8859-1.
5. The 1986 edition defines KOI8-E, which is an entirely different encoding.
6. 8859-5 misses the Ґ/ґ letter, which was reintroduced into the Ukrainian alphabet in 1990.
7. Published 1995, registered 1996.

References

1. Chaudhuri, Arindam; Mandaviya, Krupa; Badelia, Pratixa; Ghosh, Soumya K. (2016-12-24), "Optical Character Recognition Systems for French Language", Optical Character Recognition Systems for Different Languages with Soft Computing, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 109–136, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-50252-6_5, ISBN 978-3-319-50251-9, retrieved 2023-12-04
2. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 (1998-02-12). Final Text of DIS 8859-1, 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No.1 (PDF). ISO/IEC FDIS 8859-1:1998; JTC1/SC2/N2988; WG3/N411. This set of coded graphic characters may be regarded as a version of an 8-bit code according to ISO/IEC 2022 or ISO/IEC 4873 at level 1. The shaded positions in the code table correspond to bit combinations that do not represent graphic characters. Their use is outside the scope of ISO/IEC 8859; it is specified in other International Standards, for example ISO/IEC 6429.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
3. Haralambous, Yannis (September 2007). Fonts & Encodings. Translated by Horne, P. Scott (1st ed.). Sebastopol, California, USA: O'Reilly Media, Inc. pp. 37–38. ISBN 978-0-596-10242-5. According to an urban legend, the French delegate was out sick the day when the standard came up for a vote and had to have his Belgian counterpart act as his proxy. In fact, the French delegate was an engineer, who was convinced that this ligature was useless, and the Swiss and German representatives pressed hard to have the mathematical symbols × and ÷ included at the positions where Œ and œ would logically appear.
4. André, Jacques (2003-10-15) . André, Bernard; Baron, Georges-Louis; Bruillard, Éric (eds.). "Histoire d'Œ, histoire d'@ des rumeurs typographiques et de leurs enseignements". Traitement de Texte et Production de Documents INRP/GEDIAPS (in French): 19–34. Archived from the original on 2016-12-08. Retrieved 2016-12-09.
5. André, Jacques (November 1996). "ISO Latin-1, norme de codage des caractères européens? trois caractères français en sont absents!" (PDF). Cahiers GUTenberg (in French) (25): 65–77. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-11-30.
6. Everson, Michael. "Proposed ISO 8859-12 (later 14)".
7. Czyborra, Roman (1997-10-12). "The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup". Archived from the original on 2000-08-17. (NB. "Celtic" note on old Czyborra page.)
8. Jarnefors, Olle (1996-04-11). "ISO-8859-10; registration of new charset values; error in MIME draft". Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). Archived from the original on 2012-02-04. (NB. Note about forthcoming "Devanagari" standard part on IETF charsets mailing list.)
9. "Resolutions of the 12th Meeting of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3, Iraklion-Crete, Greece, 1997-07-04, 07" (PDF). Iraklion-Crete, Greece: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 N 2933, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 N 401. 1997-07-04. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-06-07. WG 3 resolves to suspend any activities on this subject until general agreement on combining characters is obtained and until the further contributions are received.
10. Czyborra, Roman (1998-12-01). "The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup". Archived from the original on 2016-03-20. (NB. "ISCII" note on new Czyborra page.)
11. Lazhintseva, Katya (1996-05-03). "Registration of new MIME charset: Windows-1257". IANA.
12. "8.2.2.3. Character encodings". HTML 5.1 2nd Edition. W3C. User agents must support the encodings defined in the WHATWG Encoding standard, including, but not limited to
13. van Kesteren, Anne. "Legacy single-byte encodings". Encoding Standard. WHATWG.
14. ^ van Kesteren, Anne. "Names and labels". Encoding Standard. WHATWG.

Further reading

• Published versions of each part of ISO/IEC 8859 are available, for a fee, from the ISO catalogue site and from the IEC Webstore.
• PDF versions of the final drafts of some parts of ISO/IEC 8859 as submitted to the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 for review & publication are available at the WG 3 web site:
  • 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)
  • ISO/IEC 8859-4:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 4: Latin alphabet No. 4 (draft dated February 12, 1998, published July 1, 1998)
  • ISO/IEC 8859-7:1999 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 7: Latin/Greek alphabet (draft dated June 10, 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-7:2003, published October 10, 2003)
  • ISO/IEC 8859-10:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 10: Latin alphabet No. 6 (draft dated February 12, 1998, published July 15, 1998)
  • ISO/IEC 8859-11:1999 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 11: Latin/Thai character set (draft dated June 22, 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001, published 15 December 2001)
  • ISO/IEC 8859-13:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 13: Latin alphabet No. 7 (draft dated April 15, 1998, published October 15, 1998)
  • ISO/IEC 8859-15:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9 (draft dated August 1, 1997; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, published March 15, 1999)
  • ISO/IEC 8859-16:2000 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 16: Latin alphabet No. 10 (draft dated November 15, 1999; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-16:2001, published July 15, 2001)
• ECMA standards, which in intent correspond exactly to the ISO/IEC 8859 character set standards, can be found at:
  • Standard ECMA-94: 8-Bit Single Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabets No. 1 to No. 4 2nd edition (June 1986)
  • Standard ECMA-113: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Cyrillic Alphabet 3rd edition (December 1999)
  • Standard ECMA-114: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Arabic Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
  • Standard ECMA-118: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Greek Alphabet (December 1986)
  • Standard ECMA-121: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Hebrew Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
  • Standard ECMA-128: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 5 2nd edition (December 1999)
  • Standard ECMA-144: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Character Sets - Latin Alphabet No. 6 3rd edition (December 2000)
• ISO/IEC 8859-1 to Unicode mapping tables as plain text files are at the Unicode FTP site.
• Informal descriptions and code charts for most ISO/IEC 8859 standards are available in ISO/IEC 8859 Alphabet Soup (Mirror)

v t e Character encodings
Early telecommunications	Telegraph code Needle Morse Non-Latin Wabun/Kana Chinese Cyrillic Baudot and Murray Fieldata ASCII ISO/IEC 646 BCDIC Teletex and Videotex/Teletext T.51/ISO/IEC 6937 ITU T.61 ITU T.101 World System Teletext background sets Transcode
ISO/IEC 8859	Approved parts -1 (Western Europe) -2 (Central Europe) -3 (Maltese/Esperanto) -4 (North Europe) -5 (Cyrillic) -6 (Arabic) -7 (Greek) -8 (Hebrew) -9 (Turkish) -10 (Nordic) -11 (Thai) -13 (Baltic) -14 (Celtic) -15 (New Western Europe) -16 (Romanian) Abandoned parts -12 (Devanagari) Proposed but not approved KOI-8 Cyrillic Sámi Adaptations Welsh Barents Cyrillic Estonian Ukrainian Cyrillic
Bibliographic use	MARC-8 ANSEL CCCII/EACC ISO 5426 5426-2 5427 5428 6438 6862
National standards	ArmSCII Big5 BraSCII CNS 11643 DIN 66003 ELOT 927 GOST 10859 GB 2312 GB 12345 GB 12052 GB 18030 HKSCS ISCII JIS X 0201 JIS X 0208 JIS X 0212 JIS X 0213 KOI-7 KPS 9566 KS X 1001 KS X 1002 LST 1564 LST 1590-4 PASCII Shift JIS SI 960 TIS-620 TSCII VISCII VSCII YUSCII
ISO/IEC 2022	ISO/IEC 8859 ISO/IEC 10367 Extended Unix Code / EUC
Mac OS Code pages ("scripts")	Armenian Arabic Barents Cyrillic Celtic Central European Croatian Cyrillic Devanagari Farsi (Persian) Font X (Kermit) Gaelic Georgian Greek Gujarati Gurmukhi Hebrew Iceland Inuit Keyboard Latin (Kermit) Maltese/Esperanto Ogham Roman Romanian Sámi Turkish Turkic Cyrillic Ukrainian VT100
DOS code pages	437 668 708 720 737 770 773 775 776 777 778 850 851 852 853 855 856 857 858 859 860 861 862 863 864 865 866 867 868 869 897 899 903 904 932 936 942 949 950 951 1040 1042 1043 1046 1098 1115 1116 1117 1118 1127 3846 ABICOMP CS Indic CSX Indic CSX+ Indic CWI-2 Iran System Kamenický Mazovia MIK
IBM AIX code pages	895 896 912 915 921 922 1006 1008 1009 1010 1012 1013 1014 1015 1016 1017 1018 1019 1046 1124 1133
Windows code pages	CER-GS 932 936 (GBK) 950 1169 Extended Latin-8 1250 1251 1252 1253 1254 1255 1256 1257 1258 1270 Cyrillic + Finnish Cyrillic + French Cyrillic + German Polytonic Greek
EBCDIC code pages	Japanese language in EBCDIC DKOI
DEC terminals (VTx)	Multinational (MCS) National Replacement (NRCS) French Canadian Swiss Spanish United Kingdom Dutch Finnish French Norwegian and Danish Swedish Norwegian and Danish (alternative) 8-bit Greek 8-bit Turkish SI 960 Hebrew Special Graphics Technical (TCS)
Platform specific	1052 1053 1054 1055 1056 1057 1058 Acorn RISC OS Amstrad CPC Apple II ATASCII Atari ST BICS Casio calculators CDC Compucolor 8001 Compucolor II CP/M+ DEC RADIX 50 DEC MCS/NRCS DG International Galaksija GEM GSM 03.38 HP Roman HP FOCAL HP RPL SQUOZE LICS LMBCS MSX NEC APC NeXT PETSCII PostScript Standard PostScript Latin 1 SAM Coupé Sega SC-3000 Sharp calculators Sharp MZ Sinclair QL Teletext TI calculators TRS-80 Ventura International WISCII XCCS ZX80 ZX81 ZX Spectrum
Unicode / ISO/IEC 10646	UTF-1 UTF-7 UTF-8 UTF-16 UTF-32 UTF-EBCDIC GB 18030 DIN 91379 BOCU-1 CESU-8 SCSU TACE16 Comparison of Unicode encodings
TeX typesetting system	Cork LY1 OML OMS OT1
Miscellaneous code pages	ABICOMP ASMO 449 Digital encoding of APL symbols ISO-IR-68 ARIB STD-B24 Fieldata HZ IEC-P27-1 INIS 7-bit 8-bit ISO-IR-169 ISO 2033 KOI KOI8-R KOI8-RU KOI8-U Mojikyō SEASCII Stanford/ITS Symbol TRON Unified Hangul Code
Control character	Morse prosigns C0 and C1 control codes ISO/IEC 6429 JIS X 0211 Unicode control, format and separator characters Whitespace characters
Related topics	CCSID Character encodings in HTML Charset detection Han unification Hardware code page MICR code Mojibake Variable-length encoding
Character sets

v t e Standards of Ecma International
Application interfaces	ANSI escape code APIW Common Language Infrastructure Office Open XML OpenXPS
File systems (tape)	Advanced Intelligent Tape DDS DLT Super DLT Linear Tape-Open (Ultrium-1) VXA
File systems (disk)	CD-ROM CD File System (CDFS) FAT FAT12 FAT16 FAT16B FD UDF Ultra Density Optical Universal Media Disc Holographic Versatile Disc
Graphics	Universal 3D
Programming languages	C++/CLI C# Eiffel JavaScript (E4X, ECMAScript) Dart Minimal BASIC Full BASIC
Radio link interfaces	NFC UWB
Other	ECMA-35 JSON
List of Ecma standards (1961 – present)

• ISO/IEC 8859
• Character sets
• Ecma standards
• ISO/IEC standards