Characters
The ISO/IEC 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/IEC 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 they could be typed as 'oe'. Ÿ, needed for all-caps text, was left out as well. These characters were, however, included later with ISO/IEC 8859-15, which also introduced the new euro sign character €. Likewise Dutch did not get the 'ij' and 'IJ' letters, because Dutch speakers had become used to typing these as two letters instead. Romanian did not initially get its ‹Ș›/‹ș› and ‹Ț›/‹ț› (with comma) letters, because these letters were initially unified with ‹Ş›/‹ş› and ‹Ţ›/‹ţ› (with cedilla) by the Unicode Consortium, considering the shapes with comma beneath to be glyph 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/IEC 8859-16.
Most of the ISO/IEC 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages using the Latin script. Others provide non-Latin alphabets: Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. Most of the encodings contain only spacing characters although the Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic ones do also contain combining characters. 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 (without using combining diacritics) either. Each Japanese syllabic alphabet (hiragana or katakana, see Kana) would fit, but like several other alphabets of the world they aren't encoded in the ISO/IEC 8859 system.
Read more about this topic: ISO/IEC 8859
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“His leanings were strictly lyrical, descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility, but on the other hand he had a lot of trouble with routine items, such as, for instance, the opening and closing of doors, or shaking hands when there were numerous characters in a room, and one person or two persons saluted many people.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets
All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then there are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.”
—Clifford Irving (b. 1930)