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The recode reference manual

8.2 ASCII extended by Latin Alphabets

There are many Latin charsets. The following has been written by Tim Lasko lasko@video.dec.com, a long while ago:

ISO Latin-1, or more completely ISO Latin Alphabet No 1, is now an international standard as of February 1987 (IS 8859, Part 1). For those American USEnet'rs that care, the 8-bit ASCII standard, which is essentially the same code, is going through the final administrative processes prior to publication. ISO Latin-1 (IS 8859/1) is actually one of an entire family of eight-bit one-byte character sets, all having ASCII on the left hand side, and with varying repertoires on the right hand side:

• Latin Alphabet No 1 (caters to Western Europe - now approved).
• Latin Alphabet No 2 (caters to Eastern Europe - now approved).
• Latin Alphabet No 3 (caters to SE Europe + others - in draft ballot).
• Latin Alphabet No 4 (caters to Northern Europe - in draft ballot).
• Latin-Cyrillic alphabet (right half all Cyrillic - processing currently suspended pending USSR input).
• Latin-Arabic alphabet (right half all Arabic - now approved).
• Latin-Greek alphabet (right half Greek + symbols - in draft ballot).
• Latin-Hebrew alphabet (right half Hebrew + symbols - proposed).

The ISO Latin Alphabet 1 is available as a charset in recode under the name Latin-1. In fact, it's true name is ISO_8859-1:1987 as per RFC 1345, accepted aliases being CP819, IBM819, ISO-8859-1, ISO_8859-1, iso-ir-100, l1 and Latin-1. The shortest way of specifying it in recode is l1.

It is an eight-bit code which coincides with ASCII for the lower half. This documentation used to include Latin-1 tables. They have been removed since the recode program can now recreate these easily:

recode -lf l1 for commented ISO Latin-1 recode -ld l1 for concise decimal table recode -lo l1 for concise octal table recode -lh l1 for concise hexadecimal table