Code page 923
| Company type | Standard |
|---|---|
| Industry | Information technology |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Products | 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character set (Latin alphabet No. 9) |
| Website | www |
ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, titled Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9, belongs to the ISO/IEC 8859 collection of ASCII-derived standard character encodings and was first released in 1999. Commonly referred to as Latin-9 (previously Latin-0), it is largely similar to ISO 8859-1, focusing on “Western European” languages but substitutes some infrequently used symbols with the euro sign and additional alphabetic characters.
| A4 | A6 | A8 | B4 | B8 | BC | BD | BE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8859-1 | ¤ | ¦ | ¨ | ´ | ¸ | ¼ | ½ | ¾ |
| 8859-15 | € | Š | š | Ž | ž | Œ | œ | Ÿ |
The official charset name for ISO-8859-15 as recognized by the IANA, when paired with control codes from ISO/IEC 6429, is ISO-8859-15. Microsoft refers to this encoding as code page 28605 or Windows-28605, while IBM identifies it with code page 923 (CCSID 923).
All characters that are printable in both ISO/IEC 8859-1 and ISO/IEC 8859-15 also appear in Windows-1252. Nevertheless, since October 2016, the adoption of ISO-8859-15 on internet platforms has fallen below 0.02%.
History
Initially introduced in 1996 with the intent to support the Sami languages, the designation ISO 8859-15 was first declined but later accepted as ISO-IR 197. A related standard, ISO 8859-16, was proposed to replace seldom-used ISO 8859-1 characters with French Œ œ, Ÿ, Dutch IJ ij, and Turkish Ğ ğ İ ı Ş ş before the euro currency existed.
The early draft character set included these new additions but underwent revisions by 1997. To avoid interfering with established usage until Unicode was more widely adopted, Turkish letters were excluded. The Dutch IJ ligature was also removed since the digraph ij was deemed sufficient. Consideration was given to incorporating Welsh letters Ŵ ŵ and Ŷ ŷ; however, these were postponed.
Four infrequently utilized ISO 8859-1 characters (¤, ¨, ´, ¸) were substituted with the euro sign (€), Ÿ, Œ, and œ to better accommodate European languages and currency requirements. The introduction of the euro made its symbol indispensable; Ÿ facilitates accurate French case transformations; Œ and œ represent French ligatures. Although these characters had appeared earlier in DEC’s Multinational Character Set (MCS), new code points were necessary due to previous assignments.
Additional suggestions proposed replacing six other symbols (¢, ¦, ±, ¼, ½, ¾) to extend language coverage. After extensive discussion—particularly concerning replacing ± with +− because of its mathematical importance—± remained unchanged while ¤ was removed.
By the late 1990s, four more characters (Š, š, Ž, ž), vital for Finnish and Estonian representations of Russian loanwords, were incorporated. The finalized set eliminated ¦, ¼, ½, and ¾ but preserved ¢ owing to its broader usage.
Despite attempts to make ISO 8859-15 the preferred choice for 8-bit text communication, it never surpassed ISO 8859-1 in popularity. It saw modest application in Linux console environments requiring euro symbol support prior to widespread Unicode implementation; currently, UTF-8 dominates encoding usage.
Coverage
ISO 8859-15 represents the "Latin alphabet no. 9" character set, extensively utilized throughout regions such as the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and large parts of Africa. It also frequently appears in conventional romanization systems for East Asian languages.
Each symbol is assigned a single 8-bit code, ensuring compatibility with most data exchange frameworks employed by these languages:
Notes
Punctuation and Apostrophes Coverage
Within this encoding, only the quotation marks «, », ", and ' are included, omitting some typographically accurate quotation forms required by certain languages.
It does not provide the proper apostrophe or directionally oriented single high quotation marks; in some cases, texts replace these with spacing grave or acute accents from ISO 8859-1, which can render adequately on specific fonts.
Codepage layout
Variations from ISO-8859-1 are marked by Unicode code points displayed beneath each character.
| 0x | 0 !1 !2 !3 !4 !5 !6 !7 !8 !9 !A !B !C !D !E !F | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1x | ||||||||||||||||
| 2x | U+0021 EXCLAMATION MARK |U+0022 QUOTATION MARK |U+0023 NUMBER SIGN |U+0024 DOLLAR SIGN |U+0025 PERCENT SIGN |U+0026 AMPERSAND |U+0027 APOSTROPHE |U+0028 LEFT PARENTHESIS |U+0029 RIGHT PARENTHESIS |U+002A ASTERISK |U+002B PLUS SIGN |U+002C COMMA |U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS |U+002E FULL STOP |U+002F SOLIDUS | |||||||||||||||
| 3x | U+0031 DIGIT ONE |U+0032 DIGIT TWO |U+0033 DIGIT THREE |U+0034 DIGIT FOUR |U+0035 DIGIT FIVE |U+0036 DIGIT SIX |U+0037 DIGIT SEVEN |U+0038 DIGIT EIGHT |U+0039 DIGIT NINE |U+003A COLON |U+003B SEMICOLON |U+003C LESS-THAN SIGN |U+003D EQUALS SIGN |U+003E GREATER-THAN SIGN |U+003F QUESTION MARK | |||||||||||||||
| 4x | U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A |U+0042 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B |U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C |U+0044 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D |U+0045 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E |U+0046 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER F |U+0047 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G |U+0048 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H |U+0049 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I |U+004A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER J |U+004B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K |U+004C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L |U+004D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M |U+004E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N |U+004F LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O | |||||||||||||||
| 5x | U+0051 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q |U+0052 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R |U+0053 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S |U+0054 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T |U+0055 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U |U+0056 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V |U+0057 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER W |U+0058 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER X |U+0059 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y |U+005A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z |U+005B LEFT SQUARE BRACKET |U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS |U+005D RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET |U+005E CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT |U+005F LOW LINE | |||||||||||||||
| 6x | U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A |U+0062 LATIN SMALL LETTER B |U+0063 LATIN SMALL LETTER C |U+0064 LATIN SMALL LETTER D |U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E |U+0066 LATIN SMALL LETTER F |U+0067 LATIN SMALL LETTER G |U+0068 LATIN SMALL LETTER H |U+0069 LATIN SMALL LETTER I |U+006A LATIN SMALL LETTER J |U+006B LATIN SMALL LETTER K |U+006C LATIN SMALL LETTER L |U+006D LATIN SMALL LETTER M | U + 006E L AT I N S M A L L L E T T E R N | U + 006F L AT I N S M A L L L E T T E R O | |||||||||||||||
| 7x |
... [table continues with standard Latin characters and punctuation] | |||||||||||||||
| Ax |
... [special characters including EURO SIGN U + 20AC, ligatures Œ/œ, letters with diacritics] | |||||||||||||||
Aliases
ISO 8859-15 is known by various vendor-specific names, such as:
- WE8ISO8859P15 (used in Oracle database)
See also
- Western Latin character sets (computing)
- DIN 91379 Unicode subset applicable to Europe
External links
- ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999 – 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9 (released March 15, 1999)
- ISO/IEC 8859-15 (final committee draft dated August 1, 1997)
- Comparison of ISO Latin 9 and ISO Latin 1
- ISO-IR 203 European supplementary Latin character set (dated September 16, 1998)