Code Page 437 - Internationalization

Internationalization

Code page 437 has a series of international characters, mainly values 128 to 175 (80_hex to AF_hex). However, it lacks many characters important to several Western languages:

• Spanish (Á, Í, Ó, Ú), French (À, Â, È, Ê, Ë, Ì, Î, Ï, Ô, Œ, œ, Ù, Û), and Portuguese (Ã, ã, Õ, õ).
• German sharp S (ß) shares its code point with the beta symbol (β), which is acceptable at the low resolution on the original IBM CGA hardware, but unacceptable at higher resolutions. Most newer glyph sets for code page 437, including those built into the IBM EGA and VGA graphics cards, prefer the German sharp S shape for this character.
• Scandinavian lacks Ø and ø. Character number 237 (ED_hex), the empty set symbol, could be used as a surrogate, but its spacing is awkward for display within a word. To compensate, the Norwegian and Danish code pages (865 and 861), replaced cent (¢) with ø, and yen (¥) with Ø.
• Most Greek alphabet symbols. (They were included in the Greek-language code pages 737 and 869.)

Along with the cent (¢), pound sterling (£) and yen/yuan (¥) currency symbols, it has a couple of former European currency symbols: the florin (ƒ, Netherlands) and the peseta (₧, Spain). The presence of the last is unusual, since the Spanish peseta was never an internationally relevant currency, and also never had a symbol of its own; it was simply abbreviated as "Pt", "Pta", "Pts", or "Ptas". Spanish models of the IBM electric typewriter, however, also had a single position devoted to it.

Later MS-DOS character sets, such as code page 850 (DOS Latin-1), code page 852 (DOS Central-European) and code page 737 (DOS Greek), filled the gaps for international use with some compatibility with code page 437 by retaining the single and double box-drawing characters, while discarding the mixed ones (e.g. horizontal double/vertical single). All code page 437 characters have similar glyphs in Unicode and in Microsoft's WGL4 character set, and therefore are available in most fonts in Microsoft Windows, and also in the default VGA font of the Linux kernel, and the ISO 10646 fonts for X11.