ISO 8859 Family of Character Sets

The ISO 8859 character sets are 8-bit extensions of ASCII, meant to permit the encoding of various alphabetic languages. Since they all include ASCII in their lower 128 bits, they all support English.

All the ISO 8859 extensions start at character number 160, which is always a non-breaking space character. The 32 characters between the last ASCII character (127, the delete character), and 160 were long ago reserved as hardware control characters.

The 16 or 32-bit standard Unicode encodes the characters of all modern spoken langages, and many others. The first 256 characters of Unicode are identical to the ISO 8859-1 character encoding; therefore the other ISO 8859 encodings have a more complicated mapping to Unicode. The tables below therefore indicate the mapping to Unicode of each character in each encoding.

Note that while Vietnamese uses a Latin-based alphabet, its system of accents makes it too big to fit into this scheme. Support for Vietamese can be found in VISCII and Unicode.

The following tables are based on information found at the Unicode consortium, as well as other sources on the Web, especially, Everson Typography, Charsets.

The page encoding of each of these tables is actually the encoding the table describes. So if the description doesn't match the character that is displayed, something is wrong with your system.

ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) West European

ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) East European

ISO 8859-3 (Latin-3) Southeast European and miscellaneous

ISO 8859-4 (Latin-4) Scandinavian/Baltic

ISO 8859-5 Cyrillic

ISO 8859-6 Arabic

ISO 8859-7 Greek

ISO 8859-8 Hebrew

ISO 8859-9 (Latin-5) Turkish

ISO 8859-10 (Latin-6) Lappish/Nordic/Eskimo

ISO 8859-11 Thai

ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7) Baltic Rim

ISO 8859-14 (Latin-8) Celtic

ISO 8859-15 (Latin-9) West European

ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10) Romainian