Concept
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 for a while Latin-0). It is similar to ISO 8859-1, and thus also intended for “Western European” languages, but replaces some less common symbols with the euro sign and some letters that were deemed necessary: This encoding is by far most used, close to half the use, by German, though this is the least used encoding for German. 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 (CCSID 923) to ISO 8859-15. All the printable characters from both ISO/IEC 8859-1 and ISO/IEC 8859-15 are also found in Windows-1252. Since October 2016, less than 0.1% (actually currently less than 0.02%) of all web sites use ISO-8859-15. The identifier ISO 8859-15 was proposed for the Sami languages in 1996, which was eventually rejected, but was passed as ISO-IR 197. A proposal called ISO 8859-0 was made in 1997, to replace 4 unused or rarely used ISO 8859-1 characters (, , , and ) with , , , and . became necessary when the euro was introduced. and are French ligatures, and is needed so that French text can be converted from lower-case to all-caps and back again without loss. Ironically, the last three 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. The same proposal also recommended replacing 6 more characters (, , , , , ) with "some other characters to cover a maximum of languages". For the euro sign, some wanted to replace the plus–minus sign instead of the currency sign.