ISO88593

ISO/IEC 8859-3, commonly called Latin-3, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 family of eight-bit single-byte character encodings. It extends the ASCII repertoire by allocating the upper half of the byte (0xA0–0xFF) to additional Latin letters used by several South European languages and for Esperanto. The design targets languages that rely on diacritics in the Latin alphabet and, in addition, includes the Esperanto letters required for that constructed language.

The encoding is a single-byte scheme, sharing the ASCII range for 0x00–0x7F, with 0x80–0x9F consisting of control codes and 0xA0–0xFF containing the extended characters. It is part of the historical effort to provide regionally tailored Latin alphabets before the broad adoption of Unicode.

In Windows terminology, ISO/IEC 8859-3 has the code page designation 28593. On other systems it is sometimes referred to as Latin-3 or simply ISO-8859-3. While it served for regional text exchange in the past, it is largely obsolete for new software, having been superseded by Unicode encodings such as UTF-8. Legacy documents and some older software systems may still rely on ISO-8859-3, particularly in environments that explicitly specify this charset.

In summary, ISO-8859-3 is an eight-bit Latin alphabet encoding designed for South European languages and Esperanto, now mainly of historical interest due to Unicode dominance.

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