Several 8-bit character sets (encodings) were designed for binary representation of common Western European languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic), which use the Latin alphabet, a few additional letters and ones with precomposed diacritics, some punctuation, and various symbols (including some Greek letters). These character sets also happen to support many other languages such as Malay, Swahili, and Classical Latin. ''This material is technically obsolete, having been functionally replaced by Unicode. However it continues to have historical interest.''

Summary

The ISO-8859 series of 8-bit character sets encodes all Latin character sets used in Europe, albeit that the same code points have multiple uses that caused some difficulty (including mojibake, or garbled characters, and communication issues). The arrival of Unicode, with a unique code point for every glyph, resolved these issues.

History

The earlier seven-bit U.S. American Standard Code for Information Interchange ('ASCII') encoding has characters sufficient to properly represent only a few languages such as English, Latin, Malay and Swahili. It is missing some letters and letter-diacritic combinations used in other Latin-alphabet languages. However, since there was no other choice on most US-supplied computer platforms, use of ASCII was unavoidable except where there was a strong national computing industry. There was the ISO 646 group of encodings which replaced some of the symbols in ASCII with local characters, but space was very limited, and some of the symbols replaced were quite common in things like programming languages. Most computers internally used eight-bit bytes but communication (seen as inherently unreliable) used seven data bits plus one parity bit. In time, it became common to use all eight bits for data, creating space for another 128 characters. In the early days most of these were system specific, but gradually the ISO/IEC 8859 standards emerged to provide some cross-platform similarity to enable information interchange. Towards the end of the 20th century, as storage and memory costs fell, the issues associated with multiple meanings of a given eight-bit code (there are seven ISO-Latin code sets alone) have ceased to be justified. All major operating systems have moved to Unicode as their main internal representation. However, as Windows did not support the UTF-8 method of encoding Unicode (preferring UTF-16), many applications continued to be restricted to these legacy character sets.

The euro sign

The introduction of the euro and its associated euro sign ( € ) introduced significant pressure on computer systems developers to support this new symbol, and most 8-bit character sets had to be adapted in some way. Whilst these decisions had limited effect for documents that were only used within a single computer (or at least within a single vendor's "digital ecosystem"), it meant that documents containing a euro sign would fail to render as expected when interchanged between ecosystems. All of these issues have been resolved as operating systems have been upgraded to support Unicode as standard, which encodes the euro sign at U+20AC (decimal 8364).

Comparison table

Code points to U+007F are not shown in this table currently, as they are directly mapped in all character sets listed here. The ASCII coding standard defines the original specification for the mapping of the first 0-127 characters. The table is arranged by Unicode code point. Character sets are referred to here by their IANA names in upper case.