The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire – a description with usage notes, section 1 General information about ISO Latin 1:

Introduction

This document describes the ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1) characters in detail from a practical point of view, with usage notes. The notes are largely based on the Unicode standard. One of the purposes is to remove common misconceptions and uncertainty as regards to meanings of characters. Too often people base their conceptions on some visible form (glyph) of a character and may therefore identify e.g. German sharp s with Greek letter beta!

For basic concepts and terms on character sets, please refer to A tutorial on character code issues by the same author. See also information about other ISO 8859 character sets.

For the different methods of presenting ISO Latin 1 characters in HTML documents, please consult e.g. Table of Character Entities for ISO Latin-1. For additional historical notes on some of the characters, see Character histories.

See also Unicode charts in PDF format, where the ISO Latin 1 characters appear in blocks Basic Latin (= Ascii) and Latin 1 Supplement.


Originally created 2000-03-31. Structurally changed 2018-10-16. Minor modifications 2018-12-15.
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