ISO 8859-15

ISO/IEC 8859-15:1999, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 15: Latin alphabet No. 9, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1999. It is informally referred to as Latin-9 (and was for a while called Latin-0). It is similar to ISO 8859-1, and thus generally intended for “Western European” languages, but replaces some less common symbols with the euro sign and some letters that were now deemed missing in part 1 for the target use.

ISO-8859-15 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 28605 a.k.a. Windows-28605 to ISO-8859-15. IBM has assigned code page 923 to ISO 8859-15.

There were attempts to make ISO-8859-15 the default character set for 8-bit communication, but it was never able to supplant the popular ISO-8859-1. However, it did see some use as a character set for terminal or textual programs under Linux when the Euro sign was needed, but the use of full UTF-8 (Unicode) was not practical. All the printable characters from both ISO/IEC 8859-1 and ISO/IEC 8859-15 are also found in Windows-1252. In October 2016 0.1% of all web sites use ISO-8859-15.

ISO 8859-15 was originally proposed for the Sami languages, but that got rejected. ISO 8859-15 was instead made from ISO 8859-1 to replace 8 less-used characters with other characters missing from ISO 8859-1. € became necessary when the euro was introduced. Š, š, Ž, and ž are used in some loanwords and transliteration of Russian names in Finnish and Estonian typography. Œ and œ are French ligatures, and Ÿ is needed in French all-caps text, as it is present in a few proper names such as the city of l'Haÿ-les-Roses or the poet and writer Pierre Louÿs. As diacritics are frequently dropped in all-caps text in French (even though the Académie française discourages this practice), a code point for Ÿ wasn't deemed necessary for ISO-8859-1, even though one was given for its lower-case equivalent ÿ (at 0xFF). Ironically, the last three characters (Œ, œ, Ÿ) had already been present in DEC's Multinational Character Set (MCS) in 1983, a character set from which ECMA-94 (1985) and ISO-8859-1 (1987) were derived. Since their original codepoints were now occupied by other characters, less logical codepoints had to be chosen for their reintroduction. It differs from ISO 8859-1 in 8 positions:

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