ISO/IEC 8859-2:1999, Information technology â€" 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets â€" Part 2: Latin alphabet No. 2, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to as "Latin-2". It is generally intended for “Eastern European†languages that are written in the Latin script. Note that ISO/IEC 8859-2 is very different from code page 852 (MS-DOS Latin 2, PC Latin 2) which is also referred to as "Latin-2" in Czech and Slovak regions.
ISO-8859-2 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 28592 aka Windows-28592 to ISO-8859-2 in Windows.
Codepage 1250 aka Windows-1250 has many of the same characters but in a different arrangement.
These code values can be used for the following languages:
- Bosnian <li>Croatian
- Czech
- German (fully compatible with ISO/IEC 8859-1 for German texts)
- Hungarian
- Polish
- Romanian
- Serbian Latin
- Slovak
- Slovene
- Upper Sorbian
- Lower Sorbian
- Turkmen.
It can also be used for Romanian, but it is unsuitable for that language, because of lack of letters s and t with commas below, containing s and t with cedillas instead. These letters were unified in the first versions of the Unicode standard, meaning that the appearance with cedilla or with comma was treated as a glyph choice rather than as separate characters; fonts intended for use with Romanian should, therefore, have characters with comma below at those code points. Still, ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Windows-1250 (with the same problem) have been heavily used for Romanian. Unicode (which supports both variants) has taken the lead for web pages, which however often have s and t with cedilla anyway.
Code page layout
In the following table characters are shown together with their corresponding Unicode code points. Note that code values 00-1F, 7F, and 80-9F are not assigned to characters by ISO/IEC 8859-2. Code 20 is the regular SPACE character, and A0 is the NON-BREAKING SPACE. Code AD is a SOFT HYPHEN, which even in isolation may not appear at all in compliant web browsers.
Legend: