Code page: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:16, 2 January 2024

Revision as of 15:33, 2 January 2024

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After IBM and Microsoft ceased to cooperate in the 1990s, the two companies have maintained the list of assigned code page numbers independently from each other, resulting in some conflicting assignments. At least one third-party vendor ([[Oracle Corporation|Oracle]]) also has its own different list of numeric assignments.<ref name="oracle.com"/> IBM's current assignments are listed in their [[CCSID]] repository, while Microsoft's assignments are documented within the [[MSDN]].<ref name="Microsoft_Codepage-ID"/> Additionally, a list of the names and approximate IANA ([[Internet Assigned Numbers Authority]]) abbreviations for the installed code pages on any given Windows machine can be found in the Registry on that machine (this information is used by Microsoft programs such as [[Internet Explorer]]).

Most well-known code pages, excluding those for the [[CJK characters|CJK]] languages and [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]],<!-- not using CJKV here because this applies to the modern romanised Vietnamese --> fit all their code-points into eight bits and do not involve anything more than mapping each code-point to a single character; furthermore, techniques such as combining characters, complex scripts, etc., are not involved.

The text mode of standard ([[VGA-compatible text mode|VGA-compatible]]) PC graphics hardware is built around using an 8-bit code page, though it is possible to use two at once with some color depth sacrifice, and up to eight may be stored in the display adaptor for easy switching.<ref name="VGA-Programming"/> There was a selection of third-party code page fonts that could be loaded into such hardware. However, it is now commonplace for operating system vendors to provide their own character encoding and rendering systems that run in a graphics mode and bypass this hardware limitation entirely. However the system of referring to character encodings by a code page number remains applicable, as an efficient alternative to string identifiers such as those specified by the IETF and IANA for use in various protocols such as e-mail and web pages.