Latin3

Latin-3, also known as ISO/IEC 8859-3, is an 8-bit single-byte character encoding in the ISO/IEC 8859 family. It was designed to cover Latin-script languages used in Southern Europe and certain minority languages, adding characters with diacritics beyond ASCII. The high half of the code page (0xA0–0xFF) is used for these additional letters and related symbols. Latin-3 is one of several Latin alphabets in the 8859 series, alongside Latin-1 and Latin-2, and it shares the same 0x00–0x7F ASCII subset.

Usage has declined with the rise of Unicode, and Latin-3 is primarily found in legacy data and software. Modern systems typically employ Unicode encodings such as UTF-8, which can represent Latin-3 characters as part of a broader character repertoire. When exchanging documents, conversion to Unicode is common to ensure portability.

The repertoire varies by version, but Latin-3 is intended to support Maltese and other Southern European languages through language-specific letters with diacritics. Because there are multiple 8859 variants designed for different language groups, Latin-3 may coexist on systems with multiple encodings.

See also: ISO/IEC 8859 family, Latin-1 (ISO/IEC 8859-1), Latin-2 (ISO/IEC 8859-2), Unicode, UTF-8.