ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999, Information technology â€" 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets â€" Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, 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/Arabic. It was designed to cover languages using the Arabic alphabet (though it does not include the extra letters needed to write most Arabic-script languages other than Arabic itself, such as Persian, Urdu, etc.). Only nominal letters are encoded, no preshaped forms of the letters, so shaping processing is required for display.
ISO-8859-6 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. The text is in logical order, so bidi processing is required for display. Nominally ISO-8859-6 (code page 28596) is for “visual orderâ€, and ISO-8859-6-I (code page 38596) is for logical order. But in practice, and required for HTML and XML documents, ISO-8859-6 also stands for logical order text. There is also ISO-8859-6-E which supposedly requires directionality to be explicitly specified with special control characters; this latter variant is in practice unused.
The range 0x80-0xFF is based on the 7-bit encoding standard ASMO 449.
Codepage layout
Legend:
Code values 0xEBâ€"0xF2 are assigned to combining characters.