ISO 8859
ISO/IEC 8859, is a standard for 8-bit character encodings for use by computers. The standard is divided into 15 numbered, separately published parts, for various script requirements. There never was a part published specifically for any African language requirements other than Arabic script for Arabic.
ISO 8859 parts of interest to Africa
Some parts of ISO 8859 are useful in Africa. However these are all being displaced by Unicode and its common implementation, UTF-8.
Latin-1 Western European
ISO 8859-1 covers most West European languages and is still a common encoding for web pages. For more info:
- ISO
- EN "ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998 Information technology -- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets -- Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1" http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=28245
- FR "ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998 Technologies de l'information -- Jeux de caractères graphiques codés sur un seul octet -- Partie 1: Alphabet latin no. 1" http://www.iso.org/iso/fr/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=28245
- (draft of standard 1998) http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG3/docs/n411.pdf
- Wikipedia
Latin-6 Latin/Arabic
ISO 8859-6 covers ASCII Latin and the Arabic characters necessary for the Arabic language. For more info:
- ISO
- EN "ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999 Information technology -- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets -- Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet" http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=28250
- FR "ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999 Technologies de l'information -- Jeux de caractères graphiques codés sur un seul octet -- Partie 6: Alphabet latin/arabe" http://www.iso.org/iso/fr/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=28250
- Wikipedia
Latin-9
ISO 8859-15 is a revision of part 1 that includes some characters used in French, Finnish, and Estonian not covered in other parts of the standard.
- ISO
- EN "ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999 Information technology -- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets -- Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9" http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=29505
- FR "ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999 Technologies de l'information -- Jeux de caractères graphiques codés sur un seul octet -- Partie 15: Alphabet latin no 9" http://www.iso.org/iso/fr/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=29505
- Wikipedia
Links & general references
- Wikipedia
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