ISO/IEC 8859-15

ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1999. It is informally referred to as Latin-9 (and was for a while called Latin-0). It is similar to ISO 8859-1, and thus generally intended for “Western European” languages, but replaces some less common symbols with the euro sign and some letters that were now deemed missing in part 1 for the target use:^[1]

ISO-8859-15 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429.

Microsoft has assigned code page 28605 a.k.a. Windows-28605 to ISO-8859-15. IBM has assigned code page 923 to ISO 8859-15.

All the printable characters from both ISO/IEC 8859-1 and ISO/IEC 8859-15 are also found in Windows-1252. In October 2016 0.1% of all web sites use ISO-8859-15.^[2][3]

History

The identifier ISO 8859-15 was proposed for the Sami languages in 1996, but that was rejected.^[4][5]

ISO 8859-15 was originally proposed as ISO 8859-0, made from ISO 8859-1 to replace 4 unused or rarely used characters (¤, ¨, ´, and ¸) with other characters missing from ISO 8859-1 (and not in any other ISO 8859 standard at the time), and 6 more characters (¢,¦,±,¼,½,¾) were proposed to possibly be dropped^[6]. € became necessary when the euro was introduced. Œ and œ are French ligatures, and Ÿ is needed in French all-caps text, as it is present in a few proper names such as the city of l'Haÿ-les-Roses or the poet and writer Pierre Louÿs. Later, four of the six characters proposed for deletion were deleted, and four more new characters were added. These characters, however, were in many other ISO standards. Š, š, Ž, and ž are used in some loanwords and transliteration of Russian names in Finnish and Estonian typography. It had been proposed to put the Euro Sign in place of the plus-minus sign instead of the currency sign (used in some applications as a FIELD SEPARATOR and by some other applications for SUBTOTAL accounting function; ¢ was proposed to remain to avoid confusion; +- would be a fallback). There was strong opposition on this. One said "The proposed «+-» is not an adequate fall-back, as this sequence, though rarely used, has already a fixed mathematical meaning, quite different from «±»; and even, if a reader would deduce the intended meaning, «±», from the context, «+-» in lieu of «±» will hurt a physicist's æsthetic feelings at least as much as «oe» in lieu of an o-e ligature a Francophone's." As a result of the opposition, people had proposed to keep the plus-minus sign and remove the currency sign instead. As diacritics are frequently dropped in all-caps text in French (even though the Académie française discourages this practice^[7]), a code point for Ÿ wasn't deemed necessary for ISO-8859-1, even though one was given for its lower-case equivalent ÿ (at 0xFF).

Ironically, the last three characters (Œ, œ, Ÿ) had already been present in DEC's Multinational Character Set (MCS) in 1983, a character set from which ECMA-94 (1985) and ISO-8859-1 (1987) were derived. Since their original codepoints were now occupied by other characters, less logical codepoints had to be chosen for their reintroduction.

There were attempts to make ISO-8859-15 the default character set for 8-bit communication, but it was never able to supplant the popular ISO-8859-1. It did see some use as the default character set for the text console and terminal programs under Linux when the Euro sign was needed, but the use of full Unicode was not practical, but this has since been replaced with UTF-8.

Coverage

ISO 8859-15 encodes what it refers to as "Latin alphabet no. 9". This character set is used throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. It is also commonly used in most standard romanizations of East-Asian languages.

Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following languages:

Modern languages with complete coverage of their alphabet

Notes

Coverage of punctuation signs and apostrophes

For some languages listed above, the correct typographical quotation marks are missing, since only «, », ", and ' are included.

Also, this encoding does not provide the correct character for the apostrophe, and oriented single high quotation marks, although some texts use the spacing grave accent and spacing acute accent, which are both part of ISO 8859-1, instead of the 6-shaped/9-shaped quotations marks or apostrophes (and this works reliably with some font styles, where all these characters are displayed as slanted wedge glyphs).

Codepage layout

Legend:

Differences from ISO/IEC 8859-1 have a thick border.

Aliases

ISO 8859-15 also has the following, vendor-specific aliases:

• WE8ISO8859P15 (Oracle database)^[8]

See also

• Western Latin character sets (computing)

References

External links

• ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999
• ISO/IEC 8859-15:1998 - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets, Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9 (draft dated August 1, 1997; superseded by ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, published March 15, 1999)
• ISO Latin 9 as compared with ISO Latin 1
• ISO-IR 203 European supplementary Latin set (September 16, 1998)