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Several 8-bit character sets (encodings) were designed for binary representation of common Western European languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic), which use the Latin alphabet, a few additional letters and ones with precomposed diacritics, some punctuation, and various symbols (including some Greek letters). These character sets also happen to support many other languages such as Malay, Swahili, and Classical Latin.
This material is technically obsolete, having been functionally replaced by Unicode. However it continues to have historical interest.
Summary
The ISO-8859 series of 8-bit character sets encodes all Latin character sets used in Europe, albeit that the same code points have multiple uses that caused some difficulty (including mojibake, or garbled characters, and communication issues). The arrival of Unicode, with a unique code point for every glyph, resolved these issues.
- ISO/IEC 8859-1 or Latin-1 is the most used and also defines the first 256 codepoints in Unicode.
- ISO/IEC 8859-15 modifies ISO-8859-1 to fully support Estonian, Finnish and French and add the euro sign.
- Windows-1252 is a superset of ISO-8859-1 that includes the printable characters from ISO/IEC 8859-15 and popular punctuation such as curved quotation marks (also known as smart quotes, such as in Microsoft Word settings and similar programs). It is common that web page tools <!-- Does "Web page tools" mean "Web developer tools" here? I (Hkbusfan) assumed so and added the link. --> for Windows use Windows-1252 but label the web page as using ISO-8859-1, this has been addressed in HTML5, which mandates that pages labeled as ISO-8859-1 must be interpreted as Windows-1252.
- IBM CP437, being intended for English only, has very little in the way of accented letters (particularly uppercase) but has far more graphics characters than the other IBM code pages listed here and also some mathematical and Greek characters that are useful as technical symbols.
- IBM CP850 has all the printable characters that ISO-8859-1 has (albeit arranged differently) and still manages to have enough graphics characters to build a usable text-mode user interface.
- IBM CP858 differs from CP850 only by one character — a dotless i (ı), rarely used outside Turkey and with no uppercase equivalent provided, was replaced by euro currency sign (€).
- IBM437 and IBM850 defined printable characters for the control code ranges. While these could not be used when printing text through DOS, as they would be trapped before reaching the screen, they could be used by applications that used screen memory directly.
- Macintosh has an Apple logo at 0xF0, and translates it to U+F8FF in the Private Use Area for Unicode.