Some Encodings

Most of the following information is a courtesy of @href{http://www.alis.com/, Alis Technologies inc.} and of Roman Czyborra's page about @href{http://czyborra.com/charsets/, The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup}. See section What is an Encoding, is an instructive presentation of the encodings.

The known encodings are:

Encoding: ASCII (`ascii.edf')

US-ASCII.

Encoding: HPRoman (`hp.edf')

The 8 bits Roman encoding for HP.

Encoding: IBM-CP437 (`ibm-cp437.edf')

This encoding is meant to be used for PC files with drawing lines.

Encoding: IBM-CP850 (`ibm-cp850.edf')

Several characters may be missing, especially Greek letters and some mathematical symbols.

Encoding: ISO-8859-1 (`iso1.edf')

The ISO-8859-1 character set, often simply referred to as Latin 1, covers most West European languages, such as French, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Irish, Scottish, and English, incidentally also Afrikaans and Swahili, thus in effect also the entire American continent, Australia and the southern two-thirds of Africa. The lack of the ligatures Dutch IJ, French OE and ,,German" quotation marks is considered tolerable.

The lack of the new C=-resembling Euro currency symbol U+20AC has opened the discussion of a new Latin0.

Encoding: ISO-8859-2 (`iso2.edf')

The Latin 2 character set supports the Slavic languages of Central Europe which use the Latin alphabet. The ISO-8859-2 set is used for the following languages: Czech, Croat, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian.

Support is provided thanks to Ogonkify.

Encoding: ISO-8859-3 (`iso3.edf')

This character set is used for Esperanto, Galician, Maltese and Turkish.

Support is provided thanks to Ogonkify.

Encoding: ISO-8859-4 (`iso4.edf')

Some letters were added to the ISO-8859-4 to support languages such as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. It is an incomplete precursor of the Latin 6 set.

Support is provided thanks to Ogonkify.

Encoding: ISO-8859-5 (`iso5.edf')

The ISO-8859-5 set is used for various forms of the Cyrillic alphabet. It supports Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian, Serbian and Ukrainian.

The Cyrillic alphabet was created by St. Cyril in the 9th century from the upper case letters of the Greek alphabet. The more ancient Glagolithic (from the ancient Slav glagol, which means "word"), was created for certain dialects from the lower case Greek letters. These characters are still used by Dalmatian Catholics in their liturgical books. The kings of France were sworn in at Reims using a Gospel in Glagolithic characters attributed to St. Jerome.

Note that Russians seem to prefer the KOI8-R character set to the ISO set for computer purposes. KOI8-R is composed using the lower half (the first 128 characters) of the corresponding American ASCII character set.

Encoding: ISO-8859-7 (`iso7.edf')

ISO-8859-7 was formerly known as ELOT-928 or ECMA-118:1986. It is meant for modern Greek.

Encoding: ISO-8859-9 (`iso9.edf')

The ISO 8859-9 set, or Latin 5, replaces the rarely used Icelandic letters from Latin 1 with Turkish letters.

Support is provided thanks to Ogonkify.

Encoding: ISO-8859-10 (`iso10.edf')

Latin 6 (or ISO-8859-10) adds the last letters from Greenlandic and Lapp which were missing in Latin 4, and thereby covers all Scandinavia.

Support is provided thanks to Ogonkify.

Encoding: ISO-8859-15 (`iso15.edf')

The new Latin9 nicknamed Latin0 aims to update Latin1 by replacing some less needed symbols (some fractions and accents) with forgotten French and Finnish letters and placing the U+20AC Euro sign in the cell of the former international currency sign.

Very few fonts yet offer the possibility to print the Euro sign.

Encoding: KOI8 (`koi8.edf')

KOI-8 (+Λλ) is a subset of ISO-IR-111 that can be used in Serbia, Belarus etc.

Encoding: MS-CP1250 (`ms-cp1250.edf')

Microsoft's CP-1250 encoding (aka CeP).

Encoding: Macintosh (`mac.edf')

For the Macintosh encoding. The support is not sufficient, and a lot of characters may be missing at the end of the job (especially Greek letters).

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