ISO 8859-1 Character Set

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.

Figure 1. Upper Part of ISO8859-1 Character Set

Upper Part of ISO8859-1 Character Set