CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Chapter 3: Character Set Standards

ASCII Variations

ere are, as of this writing, 15 extensions of the ASCII character sets, all approved by and

published through ISO. ese character sets contain the ASCII character set as their com-

mon base, plus additional characters. Extended ASCII character sets are used to represent

other writing systems, such as Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and ai. ere is also an

extensive collection of additional Latin characters, which are usually additional symbols

and accented versions of other Latin characters.

Eight-bit representations can handle 128 more characters than 7-bit representations—

the reality is that they handle only up to 94 or 96 additional characters. e documents

ISO 8859 Parts 1 through 16 (Information Processing—8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic

Character Sets) describe character sets that can be encoded in the additional 128 positions

when an 8-bit representation is used.

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Table 3-14 lists the contents of each of the 15 parts

of ISO 8859, indicating what languages are supported by each.

e 15 parts of ISO 8859Table 3-14.

Part Year Contents Languages

1 1998 Latin alphabet No. 1 Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic,

Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish

2 1999 Latin alphabet No. 2 Albanian, Czech, English, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian,

Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene

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