ISO/IEC 8859 is a series of technical standards for 8-bit character encodings developed jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Each part is numbered: 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:
Part Name Revisions Other standards Description Part 1 Latin-1Western European 1987, 1998 ECMA-94 (1985, 1986) Perhaps the most widely used part of ISO/IEC 8859, covering most Western European languages: Danish (partial), Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish (partial), French (partial), German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, Catalan, and Swedish. Languages from other parts of the world are also covered, including: Eastern European Albanian, Southeast Asian Indonesian, as well as the African languages Afrikaans and Swahili.
A modification of DEC MCS; the first (1985) standard version at the ECMA level lacked the times sign and division obelus, which were added the next year. The missing euro sign and capital Ÿ are in the revised version ISO/IEC 8859-15 (see below). The corresponding IANA character set is ISO-8859-1. Part 2 Latin-2 Central European 1987, 1999 ECMA-94 (1986)The 1985 edition includes only a version of ISO-8859-1. Supports those Central and Eastern European languages that use the Latin alphabet, including Bosnian, Polish, Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, and Hungarian. The missing euro sign can be found in version ISO/IEC 8859-16. Part 3 Latin-3South European 1988, 1999 Turkish, Maltese, and Esperanto. Largely superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-9 for Turkish. Part 4 Latin-4North European 1988, 1998 Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, and Sami. Part 5 Latin/Cyrillic 1988, 1999 ECMA-113 (1988, 1999)The 1986 edition defines KOI8-E, which is an entirely different encoding. Covers mostly Slavic languages that use a Cyrillic alphabet, including Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian (partial). Part 6 Latin/Arabic 1987, 1999 Covers the most common Arabic language characters. Does not support other languages using the Arabic script. Needs to be BiDi and cursive joining processed for display. Part 7 Latin/Greek 1987, 2003 Covers the modern Greek language (monotonic orthography). Can also be used for Ancient Greek written without accents or in monotonic orthography, but lacks the diacritics for polytonic orthography. These were introduced with Unicode. Updated 2003 to add the euro sign, drachma sign and spacing ypogegrammeni. Part 8 Latin/Hebrew 1988, 1999 Covers the modern Hebrew alphabet as used in Israel. In practice two different encodings exist, logical order (needs to be BiDi processed for display) and visual (left-to-right) order (in effect, after bidi processing and line breaking). Updated 1999 to add and . Updated at national standard level in 2002 to add euro and shekel signs and more bidirectional format effectors; the 2002 additions were never incorporated back into the ISO standard version. Part 9 Latin-5Turkish 1989, 1999 Largely the same as ISO/IEC 8859-1, replacing the rarely used Icelandic letters with Turkish ones. Part 10 Latin-6 Nordic 1992, 1998 ECMA-144 (1990, 1992, 2000) A rearrangement of Latin-4. Considered more useful for Nordic languages. Baltic languages use Latin-4 more. Part 11 Latin/Thai 2001 TIS-620 (1986, 1990) Contains characters needed for the Thai language. First revision established in 1986 at national standard level as TIS 620. Elevated to ISO standard status as a part of ISO 8859 in 2001, with the addition of a non-breaking space. Part 12 Latin/Devanagari N/A - Originally proposed to support the Celtic languages, (NB. "Celtic" note on old Czyborra page.) then slated for Latin/Devanagari, (NB. Note about forthcoming "Devanagari" standard part on IETF charsets mailing list.) but abandoned in 1997, during the 12th meeting of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3. The Celtic proposal was changed to ISO 8859-14, with part 12 possibly being reserved for ISCII Indian. (NB. "ISCII" note on new Czyborra page.) Part 13 Latin-7 Baltic Rim 1998 - Added some characters for Baltic languages which were missing from Latin-4 and Latin-6. Related to the earlier-published Windows-1257. Part 14 Latin-8 Celtic 1998 - Covers Celtic languages such as Gaelic and the Breton language. Welsh letters correspond to the earlier (1994) ISO-IR-182. Part 15 Latin-9 1999 - A revision of 8859-1 that removes some little-used symbols, replacing them with the euro sign € and the letters Š, š, Ž, ž, Œ, œ, and Ÿ, which completes the coverage of French, Finnish and Estonian. Part 16 Latin-10 South-Eastern European 2001 SR 14111 (1998) Intended for Albanian, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Slovene, but also Finnish, French, German and Irish Gaelic (new orthography). The focus lies more on letters than symbols. The generic currency sign is replaced with the euro sign.
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.
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