ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, Information technology â€" 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets â€" Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1999. It is informally referred to as Latin-9 (and was for a while called Latin-0). It is similar to ISO 8859-1, and thus generally intended for “Western European†languages, but replaces some less common symbols with the euro sign and some letters that were now deemed missing in part 1 for the target use.
ISO-8859-15 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429.
Microsoft has assigned code page 28605 aka Windows-28605 to ISO-8859-15.
There were attempts to make ISO-8859-15 the default character set for 8-bit communication, but it was never able to supplant the popular ISO-8859-1. However, it did see some use as a character set for terminal or textual programs under Linux when the Euro sign was needed, but the use of full UTF-8 (Unicode) was not practical. All the printable characters from both ISO/IEC 8859-1 and ISO/IEC 8859-15 are also found in Windows-1252.
Changes from ISO-8859-1
€ became necessary when the euro was introduced. Å , Å¡, Ž, and ž are used in some loanwords and transliteration of Russian names in Finnish and Estonian typography. Å' and Å" are French ligatures, and Ÿ is needed in French all-caps text, as it is present in a few proper names such as the city of l'Haÿ-les-Roses or the poet and writer Pierre Louÿs. As diacritics are frequently (though incorrectly) dropped in all-caps text in French, a code point for Ÿ wasn't deemed necessary for ISO-8859-1, even though one was given for its lower-case equivalent ÿ (at 0xFF).
Coverage
ISO 8859-15 encodes what it refers to as "Latin alphabet no. 9". This character set is used throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. It is also commonly used in most standard romanizations of East-Asian languages.
Each character is encoded as a single eight-bit code value. These code values can be used in almost any data interchange system to communicate in the following languages:
- Modern languages with complete coverage of their alphabet
- Notes
Coverage of punctuation signs and apostrophes
For some languages listed above, the correct typographical quotation marks are missing, since only «, », ", and ' are included.
Also, this encoding does not provide the correct character for the apostrophe, and oriented single high quotation marks, although some texts use the spacing grave accent and spacing acute accent, which are both part of ISO 8859-1, instead of the 6-shaped/9-shaped quotations marks or apostrophes (and this works reliably with some font styles, where all these characters are displayed as slanted wedge glyphs).
Codepage layout
Legend:
Differences from ISO/IEC 8859-1 have a thick border.
Aliases
ISO 8859-15 also has the following, vendor-specific aliases:
- WE8ISO8859P15 (Oracle database)
