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While the 96 printable ASCII characters are sufficient to exchange information in modern English, most other languages that use the Roman alphabet need additional symbols not covered by ASCII, such as ß ( German), å ( Swedish and other Nordic languages). ISO 8859 sought to remedy this problem by utilizing the eighth bit, which was unused in ASCII, to allow positions for another 128 characters. However, more characters were needed to achieve this than could fit in a single 8-bit character encoding, so several mappings were developed, including at least 10 just to cover the Latin script.
The ISO 8859-n standard is not the same as the well-known ISO-8859-n character encodings approved by the IANA for use on the Internet. Besides the extra hyphen being present in the IANA-approved name, the encodings differ in that each part of the ISO standard assigns, at most, 191 characters to the byte ranges 32 to 126 and 160 to 255, whereas the corresponding IANA-approved character encoding merges these mappings with the C0 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 0 to 31) and the C1 control set (control characters mapped to bytes 127 to 159), resulting in a full 8-bit character map with most, if not all, bytes assigned.
The ISO 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not typography; the standard omits symbols needed for high-quality typography, such as optional ligatures, curly quotation marks, dashes, etc. As a result, high-quality typesetting systems often use proprietary or idiosyncratic extensions on top of the ASCII and ISO 8859 standards, or use Unicode instead.
As a rule of thumb, if a character or symbol was not already part of a widely used data-processing character set and was also not usually provided on typewriter keyboards for a national language, it didn't get in. Hence the directional double quotation marks « and » used for some European languages were included, but not the directional double quotation marks “ and ” used for English and some other languages. French didn't get its œ and Œ ligatures because French speakers had not previously needed them enough to demand them on their keyboards; nor did it get Ÿ, because this character is only used in French in all caps text. These characters were, however, included later with ISO 8859-15, which also introduced the new Euro character €. Likewise Dutch did not get the 'ij' and 'IJ' letters, because Dutch speakers had gotten used to typing these as two letters instead. Romanian did not initially get its ' /' and ' /' letters, because these letters were initially unified with ' S/sA cedilla is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritic mark to modify their pronunciation. The tail is the bottom half of a miniature cursive z or Ezh: / . The name "cedilla" is the diminutive of the old Spanish name for zed ceda''.' and ' T/tA cedilla is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritic mark to modify their pronunciation. The tail is the bottom half of a miniature cursive z or Ezh: / . The name "cedilla" is the diminutive of the old Spanish name for zed ceda''.' by the Unicode Consortium, considering the shapes with comma beneath to be glyphA glyph is a carved figure or character, incised or in relief; a carved pictograph; hence, a pictograph representing a form originally adopted for sculpture, whether carved or painted. Augustan English scholars of the early 18th century, imitating French variants of the shapes with cedilla. However, the letters with explicit comma below were later added to the Unicode standard and are also in ISO 8859-16ISO 8859-16 also known as Latin-10 or "South-Eastern European", is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. It was designed to cover Albanian, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Slovenian, but also Finnish, French, Germa.
Most of the ISO 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages. Others provide non-Roman alphabets: GreekThe Greek language is written in the Greek alphabet developed in classical times (around the 9th century BC) and passed down to the present. In ancient Greece, its letters were also used to represent numbers, called Greek numerals, in analogy with Roman n, CyrillicThe Cyrillic alphabet is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages ( Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. The plan of the alphabet is, Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. However, the standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages ( CJK), as their ideographic writing systems require many thousands of code points. Although it uses Latin based characters, Vietnamese does not fit into 96 positions either; Japanese syllabic Kana scripts, on the other hand, might, but like several other alphabets of the world isn't encoded.