ISO/IEC 8859-6

ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as Latin/Arabic. It was designed to cover languages using the Arabic alphabet. Only nominal letters are encoded, no preshaped forms of the letters, so shaping processing is required for display. It was never very popular. In recent times it is giving way to Unicode.

ISO-8859-6 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. The text is in logical order, so bidi processing is required for display. Nominally ISO-8859-6 is for “visual order”, and ISO-8859-6-I is for logical order. But in practice, and required for HTML and XML documents, ISO-8859-6 also stands for logical order text. There is also ISO-8859-6-E which supposedly requires directionality to be explicitly specified with special control characters; this latter variant is in practice unused.

The range 0x80-0xFF is based on the 7-bit encoding standard ASMO 449.

Codepage layout

Code values 0xEB–0xF2 are assigned to combining characters.

External links

• ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999
• Standard ECMA-114: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Arabic Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
• ISO-IR 127 Right-Hand Part of Latin/Arabic Alphabet (November 30, 1986)