Kamenický encoding

The Kamenický encoding (Czech: kódování Kamenických), named for the brothers Jiří and Marian Kamenický, was a code page for personal computers running MS-DOS, very popular in Czechoslovakia (since 1993, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) around 1985–1995. Another name for this encoding is KEYBCS2, the name of the Terminate and Stay Resident utility which implemented the matching keyboard driver.

It was based on the code page 437 encoding (with accented characters for Western-European languages) where most of the characters from code points 128 to 173 were replaced by Czech and Slovak characters chosen so that the glyphs of the replacement characters resembled those of the original as closely as possible, e. g. č in the place of ç. This ensured that text in the Kamenický encoding was (barely) readable even on older or cheap computers with the original fonts (which were often in videocard ROM, making modification difficult if not impossible).

A supplemental feature was that the block graphic characters of code page 437 remained unchanged (IBM's official Central-European code page 852 did not have this property, making programs like Norton Commander look funny with corners and joints of border lines broken by accented letters).

Some ambiguity exists in the official code page assignment for the Kamenický encoding:

Some dot matrix printers of the NEC Pinwriter series, namely the P3200/P3300 (P20/P30), P6200/P6300 (P60/P70), P9300 (P90), P7200/P7300 (P62/P72), P22Q/P32Q, P3800/P3900 (P42Q/P52Q), P1200/P1300 (P2Q/P3Q), P2000 (P2X) and P8000 (P72X), supported the installation of optional font EPROMs.^[1] The optional ROM #2 "East Europe" included this encoding. While named "Kamenický" in the documentation,^[1] it was originally advertised by NEC as code page 867 (CP867) or "Czech".^[2]

The encoding was also sometimes called code page 895 (CP895), for example in the WordPerfect^[3] text processor and under the Arachne^[3] web browser for DOS, but IBM uses this code page number for a different encoding, CM/Group 2: 7-bit Latin SBCS: Japanese (EUC-JP JIS-Roman)^[3][4] or Japan 7-Bit Latin (00895),^[5] and the IANA does not recognize the number at all. The DOS code page switching driver NECPINW.CPI for NEC Pinwriters supported the Kamenický encoding under both, code page 867 and 895 as well.^[3]

The widespread use of the Kamenický encoding was undermined neither by IBM's code page 852, nor by the Windows 3.1 introducing Microsoft Central Europe code page 1250. Only with Windows 95 and the spreading deployment of Microsoft Office did users begin to use code page 1250, which in turn is now obsoleted by Unicode.

Character table

Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point and its decimal code point. Only the second half of the table (code points 128–255) is shown, the first half (code points 0–127) being the same as ASCII and code page 437. Code points 129–130, 132, 142, 144, 147–148, 153–154, 160–163, 172, and 174–255 are identical to code page 437 as well.^[1][6]

While the original display^{[6][nb 1]} and printer fonts^[1] defined code point 173 as section sign ('§', U+00A7), some tools also used an inverted exclamation mark ('¡', U+00A1) instead.^{[citation needed]} This variant is not fully compliant with the definition of code page 867 / 895 and should therefore not be associated with these numbers. (In lack of an official code page ID for them, user-definable code page numbers 58211 (E363h) or 58239 (E37Fh) could be used as "handles" to these encodings in a local or private context.)

Differences from code page 437 have a gray border, code points used for multiple purposes in code page 437 are shaded slightly darker.

See also

• Mazovia encoding – similar code page for Polish

Notes

1. ↑ The Czech DOS word processor Text602 (cs) aka T602 assigned code point 173 to a section sign (U+00A7) in Kamenický encoding.

References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Pinwriter Familie - Pinwriter - Epromsockel - Zusätzliche Zeichensätze / Schriftarten (Printed reference manual for optional font and codepage EPROMs for NEC Pinwriters, including custom variants) (in German) (00 3/93 ed.), NEC Deutschland GmbH, 1993 
2. ↑ NEC Pinwriter. Ein Maßstab in der Profiklasse. (Printed 11-page color flyer about NEC Pinwriters P20/P30, P60/P70 and P90) (in German) (P-EAM-D-5/92 ed.), NEC Deutschland GmbH, 1992  (NB. According to this publication, these printers included optional support for code page 867 (CP867), as it were also supported in display fonts in MS-DOS 5.0 and DR DOS 6.0.)
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Paul, Matthias (2001) [1996], "Specification and reference documentation for NECPINW", NECPINW.CPI - DOS code page switching driver for NEC Pinwriters (2.08 ed.), FILESPEC.TXT from NECPI208.ZIP, retrieved 2013-04-22 
4. ↑ IBM Character Data Representation Architecture (CDRA) level 2
5. ↑
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 luki (1996-06-19). "The Czech and Slovak Character Encoding Mess Explained". cs-encodings-faq (1.10 ed.). Retrieved 2013-04-24. 

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