Editing ISO/IEC 8859 (section)

==Characters==
The ISO/IEC 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not [[typography]]; the standard omits symbols needed for high-quality typography, such as optional ligatures, curly quotation marks, dashes, etc. As a result, high-quality typesetting systems often use proprietary or idiosyncratic extensions on top of the [[ASCII]] and ISO/IEC 8859 standards, or use [[Unicode]] instead.

An inexact rule based on practical experience states that if a character or symbol was not already part of a widely used data-processing character set and was also not usually provided on typewriter keyboards for a national language, it did not get in. Hence the directional double quotation marks ''«'' and ''»'' used for some European languages were included, but not the directional double quotation marks ''“'' and ''”'' used for English and some other languages.

French did not get its ''œ'' and ''Œ'' ligatures because they could be typed as 'oe'. Likewise, ''Ÿ'', needed for all-caps text, was dropped as well.<ref name="Haralambous_2007"/><ref name="Andre_2003"/><ref name="Andre_1996"/> Albeit under different codepoints, these three characters were later reintroduced with [[ISO/IEC 8859-15]] in 1999, which also introduced the new [[euro sign]] character €. Likewise Dutch did not get the ''ĳ'' and ''Ĳ'' letters, because Dutch speakers had become used to typing these as two letters instead.

Romanian did not initially get its ''Ș''/''ș'' and ''Ț''/''ț'' ([[Comma (punctuation)#Diacritical usage|with comma]]) letters, because these letters were initially unified with ''Ş''/''ş'' and ''Ţ''/''ţ'' ([[Cedilla|with cedilla]]) by the [[Unicode Consortium]], considering the shapes with comma beneath to be [[typographic approximation|glyph variants]] of the shapes with cedilla. However, the letters with explicit comma below were later added to the Unicode standard and are also in [[ISO/IEC 8859-16]].

Most of the ISO/IEC 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages using the Latin script. Others provide non-Latin alphabets: [[Greek alphabet|Greek]], [[Cyrillic script|Cyrillic]], [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew]], [[Arabic alphabet|Arabic]] and [[Thai alphabet|Thai]]. Most of the encodings contain only [[spacing characters]], although the Thai, Hebrew, and Arabic ones do also contain [[combining character]]s.

The standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages (''[[CJK characters|CJK]]''), as their ideographic [[writing system]]s require many thousands of code points. Although it uses Latin based characters, [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]] does not fit into 96 positions (without using combining diacritics such as in [[Windows-1258]]) either. Each Japanese syllabic alphabet (hiragana or katakana, see [[Kana]]) would fit, as in [[JIS X 0201]], but like several other alphabets of the world they are not encoded in the ISO/IEC 8859 system.