The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire - a description with usage notes

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 2.0 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.

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.

• The simple code table, with links to descriptions of characters
• The characters listed in code number order
• Detailed descriptions of the characters
• The characters grouped logically
• Explanations and notations

The document for which this is an index file is also available as single file.

Last update: 1998-12-08