8859Familien

The ISO/IEC 8859 family, often referred to as 8859 or the Latin family, is a set of eight-bit single-byte character encodings designed to extend ASCII and to support a range of languages with diacritical marks. Each encoding in the family uses 0 to 127 to mirror ASCII, while the positions 128 to 255 are allocated to language-specific characters. The standard is organized into multiple parts, commonly numbered 8859-1 through 8859-16, each intended for particular scripts or language groups.

The 8859 encodings are designed to be simple, byte-compatible with ASCII, and easy to implement in software and data transmissions. They were widely adopted in the 1980s and 1990s for personal computers, operating systems, software applications, and email. Notable members include ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) for Western European languages, ISO-8859-5 for Cyrillic, ISO-8859-8 for Hebrew, ISO-8859-9 for Turkish, and ISO-8859-15, which added the euro sign and updated certain characters. Some parts cover Central, Southern, and Northern European languages, as well as Baltic and Celtic languages, with others addressing non-Latin scripts such as Thai in 8859-11.

With the rise of Unicode, especially UTF-8, the ISO/IEC 8859 family has largely been superseded for new projects. However, it remains relevant for legacy data, archived files, older systems, and environments with limited Unicode support. Interoperability issues have arisen when comparing ISO-8859 encodings to Windows code pages (notably Windows-1252 vs ISO-8859-1) in the 0x80–0x9F range, where Windows adds printable characters that ISO-8859-1 reserves as control codes.