Some symbologies (ex. Code 128, PDF417) define the default character set to apply is ISO 8859-1 when such information is not present in the barcode. ISO 8859-1 encodes what it refers to as “Latin alphabet no. 1,” consisting of 191 characters from the Latin script. This character-encoding scheme is used throughout The Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. It is also commonly used in most standard romanizations of East-Asian languages.
Note
Although Windows 1252-1 encoding overlaps ISO8859-1, the two character sets are not the same. Windows 1252-1 uses code range 0x80~0x9f for additional printable characters, while they are reserved for control characters in ISO8859-1.