The ISO 8859 Family

The ISO 8859 Family

American English is easily representable in 7-bit ASCII. Most other languages are not. For example, the character é is not in ASCII.

Most Western European languages are representable in 8-bit ISO 8859-1, which is commonly known as Latin 1. Latin 1 is a superset of ASCII that includes characters used by several Western European languages (such as ö, , ñ, ç, �).

ISO 8859 comes in nine parts, many of which overlap; all are supersets of ASCII.

The ISO 8859 Character Sets are shown in Table 6-10.

ISO 8859 Character Sets
Character Set Common Name Languages Supported
8859-1 Latin 1 Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
8859-2 Latin 2 Albanian, Czech, English, German, Hungarian, Polish, Rumanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene
8859-3 Latin 3 Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, English, Esperanto, German, Italian, Maltese, Spanish, Turkish
8859-4 Latin 4 Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greenlandic, Lapp, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Swedish
8859-5 Latin/Cyrillic Bulgarian, Byelorussian, English, Macedonian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian
8859-6 Latin/Arabic Arabic, English (see ISO 8859-6 specification)
8859-7 Latin/Greek English, Greek (see ISO 8859-7 specification)
8859-8 Latin/Hebrew English, Hebrew (see ISO 8859-8 specification)
8859-9 Latin 5 Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

ISO 8859 Character Sets
Character Set	Common Name	Languages Supported
8859-1	Latin 1	Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
8859-2	Latin 2	Albanian, Czech, English, German, Hungarian, Polish, Rumanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene
8859-3	Latin 3	Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, English, Esperanto, German, Italian, Maltese, Spanish, Turkish
8859-4	Latin 4	Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greenlandic, Lapp, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Swedish
8859-5	Latin/Cyrillic	Bulgarian, Byelorussian, English, Macedonian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian
8859-6	Latin/Arabic	Arabic, English (see ISO 8859-6 specification)
8859-7	Latin/Greek	English, Greek (see ISO 8859-7 specification)
8859-8	Latin/Hebrew	English, Hebrew (see ISO 8859-8 specification)
8859-9	Latin 5	Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

IRIX contains over 500 Latin 1 fonts, as well as a few fonts for each of the other 8859-encoded character sets, except 8859-6 and 8859-8. Currently, IRIX contains no fonts for use with the 8859-6 or 8859-8 character sets.

To get the list of ISO-8859 fonts, enter the following:

xlsfonts

Or you can restrict the amount of output, for example, by typing

xlsfonts '*8859-2'

To see the encoding, use the xfd command. For example:

xfd -fn -sgi-screen-medium-r-normal--9-90-72-72-m-60-iso8859-1

For more information on xlsfonts and xfd, and installing and using fonts, refer to Chapter 5, "Working With Fonts."