Gaj's Latin Alphabet - Computing

Computing

In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the proper character encoding to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers.

• An attempt was made to apply the 7-bit "YUSCII", later "CROSCII", which included the five letters with diacritics at the expense of five non-letter characters (, {, }, @), but it was ultimately unsuccessful. Because the ASCII character @ sorts before A, this led to jokes calling it žabeceda (žaba=frog, abeceda=alphabet).
• Other short-lived vendor-specific efforts were also undertaken.
• The 8-bit ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) standard was developed by ISO.
• MS-DOS introduced 8-bit encoding CP852 for Central European languages, disregarding the ISO standard.
• Microsoft Windows spread yet another 8-bit encoding called CP1250, which had a few letters mapped one-to-one with ISO 8859-2, but also had some mapped elsewhere.
• Apple used yet another encoding called the Macintosh Central European encoding.
• EBCDIC also has a Latin-2 encoding.

The preferred character encoding for Croatian today is either the ISO 8859-2, or the Unicode encoding UTF-8 (with two bytes or 16 bits necessary to use the letters with diacritics). However, as of 2010, one can still find programs as well as databases that use CP1250, CP852 or even CROSCII.