CHARSETS(7) Linux Programmer's Manual CHARSETS(7)
NAME
charsets - character set standards and internationalization
DESCRIPTION
This manual page gives an overview on different character set standards
and how they were used on Linux before Unicode became ubiquitous. Some
of this information is still helpful for people working with legacy
systems and documents.
Standards discussed include such as ASCII, GB 2312, ISO 8859, JIS,
KOI8-R, KS, and Unicode.
The primary emphasis is on character sets that were actually used by
locale character sets, not the myriad others that could be found in
data from other systems.
ASCII
ASCII (American Standard Code For Information Interchange) is the orig-
inal 7-bit character set, originally designed for American English.
Also known as US-ASCII. It is currently described by the ISO 646:1991
IRV (International Reference Version) standard.
Various ASCII variants replacing the dollar sign with other currency
symbols and replacing punctuation with non-English alphabetic charac-
ters to cover German, French, Spanish, and others in 7 bits emerged.
All are deprecated; glibc does not support locales whose character sets
are not true supersets of ASCII.
As Unicode, when using UTF-8, is ASCII-compatible, plain ASCII text
still renders properly on modern UTF-8 using systems.
ISO 8859
ISO 8859 is a series of 15 8-bit character sets, all of which have
ASCII in their low (7-bit) half, invisible control characters in posi-
tions 128 to 159, and 96 fixed-width graphics in positions 160-255.
Of these, the most important is ISO 8859-1 ("Latin Alphabet No .1" /
Latin-1). It was widely adopted and supported by different systems,
and is gradually being replaced with Unicode. The ISO 8859-1 charac-
ters are also the first 256 characters of Unicode.
Console support for the other 8859 character sets is available under
Linux through user-mode utilities (such as setfont(8)) that modify key-
board bindings and the EGA graphics table and employ the "user mapping"
font table in the console driver.
Here are brief descriptions of each set:
8859-1 (Latin-1)
Latin-1 covers many West European languages such as Albanian,
Basque, Danish, English, Faroese, Galician, Icelandic, Irish,
Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. The lack
of the ligatures Dutch /, French , and old-style German quota-
tion marks was considered tolerable.
8859-2 (Latin-2)
Latin-2 supports many Latin-written Central and East European
languages such as Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, German, Hungarian,
Polish, Slovak, and Slovene. Replacing Romanian / with / was
considered tolerable.
8859-3 (Latin-3)
Latin-3 was designed to cover of Esperanto, Maltese, and Turk-
ish, but 8859-9 later superseded it for Turkish.
8859-4 (Latin-4)
Latin-4 introduced letters for North European languages such as
Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, but was superseded by 8859-10
and 8859-13.
8859-5 Cyrillic letters supporting Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian,
Russian, Serbian, and (almost completely) Ukrainian. It was
never widely used, see the discussion of KOI8-R/KOI8-U below.
8859-6 Was created for Arabic. The 8859-6 glyph table is a fixed font
of separate letter forms, but a proper display engine should
combine these using the proper initial, medial, and final forms.
8859-7 Was created for Modern Greek in 1987, updated in 2003.
8859-8 Supports Modern Hebrew without niqud (punctuation signs). Niqud
and full-fledged Biblical Hebrew were outside the scope of this
character set.
8859-9 (Latin-5)
This is a variant of Latin-1 that replaces Icelandic letters
with Turkish ones.
8859-10 (Latin-6)
Latin-6 added the Inuit (Greenlandic) and Sami (Lappish) letters
that were missing in Latin-4 to cover the entire Nordic area.
8859-11
Supports the Thai alphabet and is nearly identical to the
TIS-620 standard.
8859-12
This set does not exist.
8859-13 (Latin-7)
Supports the Baltic Rim languages; in particular, it includes
Latvian characters not found in Latin-4.
8859-14 (Latin-8)
This is the Celtic character set, covering Old Irish, Manx,
Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.
8859-15 (Latin-9)
Latin-9 is similar to the widely used Latin-1 but replaces some
less common symbols with the Euro sign and French and Finnish
letters that were missing in Latin-1.
8859-16 (Latin-10)
This set covers many Southeast European languages, and most im-
portantly supports Romanian more completely than Latin-2.
KOI8-R / KOI8-U
KOI8-R is a non-ISO character set popular in Russia before Unicode.
The lower half is ASCII; the upper is a Cyrillic character set somewhat
better designed than ISO 8859-5. KOI8-U, based on KOI8-R, has better
support for Ukrainian. Neither of these sets are ISO-2022 compatible,
unlike the ISO 8859 series.
Console support for KOI8-R is available under Linux through user-mode
utilities that modify keyboard bindings and the EGA graphics table, and
employ the "user mapping" font table in the console driver.
GB 2312
GB 2312 is a mainland Chinese national standard character set used to
express simplified Chinese. Just like JIS X 0208, characters are
mapped into a 94x94 two-byte matrix used to construct EUC-CN. EUC-CN
is the most important encoding for Linux and includes ASCII and GB
2312. Note that EUC-CN is often called as GB, GB 2312, or CN-GB.
Big5
Big5 was a popular character set in Taiwan to express traditional Chi-
nese. (Big5 is both a character set and an encoding.) It is a super-
set of ASCII. Non-ASCII characters are expressed in two bytes. Bytes
0xa1-0xfe are used as leading bytes for two-byte characters. Big5 and
its extension were widely used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is not ISO
2022 compliant.
JIS X 0208
JIS X 0208 is a Japanese national standard character set. Though there
are some more Japanese national standard character sets (like JIS X
0201, JIS X 0212, and JIS X 0213), this is the most important one.
Characters are mapped into a 94x94 two-byte matrix, whose each byte is
in the range 0x21-0x7e. Note that JIS X 0208 is a character set, not
an encoding. This means that JIS X 0208 itself is not used for ex-
pressing text data. JIS X 0208 is used as a component to construct en-
codings such as EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, and ISO-2022-JP. EUC-JP is the most
important encoding for Linux and includes ASCII and JIS X 0208. In
EUC-JP, JIS X 0208 characters are expressed in two bytes, each of which
is the JIS X 0208 code plus 0x80.
KS X 1001
KS X 1001 is a Korean national standard character set. Just as JIS X
0208, characters are mapped into a 94x94 two-byte matrix. KS X 1001 is
used like JIS X 0208, as a component to construct encodings such as
EUC-KR, Johab, and ISO-2022-KR. EUC-KR is the most important encoding
for Linux and includes ASCII and KS X 1001. KS C 5601 is an older name
for KS X 1001.
ISO 2022 and ISO 4873
The ISO 2022 and 4873 standards describe a font-control model based on
VT100 practice. This model is (partially) supported by the Linux ker-
nel and by xterm(1). Several ISO 2022-based character encodings have
been defined, especially for Japanese.
There are 4 graphic character sets, called G0, G1, G2, and G3, and one
of them is the current character set for codes with high bit zero (ini-
tially G0), and one of them is the current character set for codes with
high bit one (initially G1.
CHARSETS(7) Linux Programmer's Manual CHARSETS(7)
NAME
charsets - character set standards and internationalization
DESCRIPTION
This manual page gives an overview on different character set standards
and how they were used on Linux before Unicode became ubiquitous. Some
of this information is still helpful for people working with legacy
systems and documents.
Standards discussed include such as ASCII, GB 2312, ISO 8859, JIS,
KOI8-R, KS, and Unicode.
The primary emphasis is on character sets that were actually used by
locale character sets, not the myriad others that could be found in
data from other systems.
ASCII
ASCII (American Standard Code For Information Interchange) is the orig-
inal 7-bit character set, originally designed for American English.
Also known as US-ASCII. It is currently described by the ISO 646:1991
IRV (International Reference Version) standard.
Various ASCII variants replacing the dollar sign with other currency
symbols and replacing punctuation with non-English alphabetic charac-
ters to cover German, French, Spanish, and others in 7 bits emerged.
All are deprecated; glibc does not support locales whose character sets
are not true supersets of ASCII.
As Unicode, when using UTF-8, is ASCII-compatible, plain ASCII text
still renders properly on modern UTF-8 using systems.
ISO 8859
ISO 8859 is a series of 15 8-bit character sets, all of which have
ASCII in their low (7-bit) half, invisible control characters in posi-
tions 128 to 159, and 96 fixed-width graphics in positions 160-255.
Of these, the most important is ISO 8859-1 ("Latin Alphabet No .1" /
Latin-1). It was widely adopted and supported by different systems,
and is gradually being replaced with Unicode. The ISO 8859-1 charac-
ters are also the first 256 characters of Unicode.
Console support for the other 8859 character sets is available under
Linux through user-mode utilities (such as setfont(8)) that modify key-
board bindings and the EGA graphics table and employ the "user mapping"
font table in the console driver.
Here are brief descriptions of each set:
8859-1 (Latin-1)
Latin-1 covers many West European languages such as Albanian,
Basque, Danish, English, Faroese, Galician, Icelandic, Irish,
Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. The lack
of the ligatures Dutch /, French , and old-style German quota-
tion marks was considered tolerable.
8859-2 (Latin-2)
Latin-2 supports many Latin-written Central and East European
languages such as Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, German, Hungarian,
Polish, Slovak, and Slovene. Replacing Romanian / with / was
considered tolerable.
8859-3 (Latin-3)
Latin-3 was designed to cover of Esperanto, Maltese, and Turk-
ish, but 8859-9 later superseded it for Turkish.
8859-4 (Latin-4)
Latin-4 introduced letters for North European languages such as
Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, but was superseded by 8859-10
and 8859-13.
8859-5 Cyrillic letters supporting Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian,
Russian, Serbian, and (almost completely) Ukrainian. It was
never widely used, see the discussion of KOI8-R/KOI8-U below.
8859-6 Was created for Arabic. The 8859-6 glyph table is a fixed font
of separate letter forms, but a proper display engine should
combine these using the proper initial, medial, and final forms.
8859-7 Was created for Modern Greek in 1987, updated in 2003.
8859-8 Supports Modern Hebrew without niqud (punctuation signs). Niqud
and full-fledged Biblical Hebrew were outside the scope of this
character set.
8859-9 (Latin-5)
This is a variant of Latin-1 that replaces Icelandic letters
with Turkish ones.
8859-10 (Latin-6)
Latin-6 added the Inuit (Greenlandic) and Sami (Lappish) letters
that were missing in Latin-4 to cover the entire Nordic area.
8859-11
Supports the Thai alphabet and is nearly identical to the
TIS-620 standard.
8859-12
This set does not exist.
8859-13 (Latin-7)
Supports the Baltic Rim languages; in particular, it includes
Latvian characters not found in Latin-4.
8859-14 (Latin-8)
This is the Celtic character set, covering Old Irish, Manx,
Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.
8859-15 (Latin-9)
Latin-9 is similar to the widely used Latin-1 but replaces some
less common symbols with the Euro sign and French and Finnish
letters that were missing in Latin-1.
8859-16 (Latin-10)
This set covers many Southeast European languages, and most im-
portantly supports Romanian more completely than Latin-2.
KOI8-R / KOI8-U
KOI8-R is a non-ISO character set popular in Russia before Unicode.
The lower half is ASCII; the upper is a Cyrillic character set somewhat
better designed than ISO 8859-5. KOI8-U, based on KOI8-R, has better
support for Ukrainian. Neither of these sets are ISO-2022 compatible,
unlike the ISO 8859 series.
Console support for KOI8-R is available under Linux through user-mode
utilities that modify keyboard bindings and the EGA graphics table, and
employ the "user ma
Linux 2020-08-13 CHARSETS(7)
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