Windows-1256
Encyclopedia
Windows-1256 is a code page
Code page
Code page is another term for character encoding. It consists of a table of values that describes the character set for a particular language. The term code page originated from IBM's EBCDIC-based mainframe systems, but many vendors use this term including Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle Corporation...

 used to write Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 (and possibly some other languages that use Arabic script, like Persian) under Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.  This code page is not compatible with ISO 8859-6 and MacArabic
MacArabic encoding
MacArabic encoding is used in Apple Macintosh computers to represent Arabic texts.Only the upper half of the table is shown, the lower half being plain ASCII....

 encodings.

It encodes every abstract single letter of the basic Arabic alphabet, not every isolated, initial, medial, final or legature form of them. Arabic letters in C0-FF range are in Arabic alphabetic order, but some Latin characters are interspersed within them. These are some Windows-1252
Windows-1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...

 Latin characters used for French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, due to this European language has some historic relevance in former French colonies in North Africa as Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

 and Algeria
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

. This way, French text can be rendered with Windows 1256 up to a passable accuracy (but it lacks accentuated French letters anyway).

Unicode and UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

 are preferred to Windows 1256 in modern applications.

Code page layout

Only the upper half (128–255) of the table is shown, the lower half (0–127) being plain ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

.

Here every Arabic letter is shown in isolated form. The actual forms of the letters inside Arabic words are rendered by a combination of software rules and appropriate font support.
–0 –1 –2 –3 –4 –5 –6 –7 –8 –9 –A –B –C –D –E –F

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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