Standards Development

Scope

Within the general scope described in ISO/IEC 9995-1, this document defines mappings of different sets of graphic characters onto the uppercase and lowercase forms of the 26 basic Latin characters (A…Z and a…z) and the digits 0…9, each of these mappings constituting a “group” as defined in ISO/IEC 9995-2.

This repertoire consisting of all these groups is intended to address all characters needed to write virtually all contemporary languages using the Latin script (excluding only some specific orthographies of specific minority languages), together with standardized Latin transliterations of some major languages using other scripts. It also contains several symbols and punctuation marks which are commonly used in typography and in office, scientific and educational use.

It also addresses characters of some other scripts (Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Hebrew) to the same extent (in the case of Cyrillic, leaving out some minority languages of the Russian Federation which have only a few hundred speakers left). It provides means to include other scripts (e.g. Devanagari) in future versions of this document (e.g. by amendments).

Furthermore, this document defines a mechanism which defines how the groups defined in this document can be used within a keyboard layout specification, by a special function called “Superselect”. This, when used in combination with an existing national version keyboard layout, allows the input of a minimum character repertoire as defined herein.

Also, this document defines a mechanism to enter characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

This document is primarily intended for word-processing and text-processing applications, to be used with keyboards which have at least 26 dedicated keys to enter letters and 10 additional keys to enter decimal digits.