Windows-1258

Windows-1258 is a codepage used in Microsoft Windows to represent Vietnamese texts. It makes use of combining diacritical marks. Windows-1258 is not compatible with VISCII. It is very similar to windows-1252 with the differences being that s-caron and z-caron (which were added to windows-1252 later) are missing, four of the letters with diacritics have been replaced by combining diacritics and a few other letter/diacritic combinations have been replaced.

Use of combining diacritics means that windows-1258 can cover the large number of letter/diacritic combinations in Vietnamese without compromising coverage of control codes or symbols.

UTF-8 is the preferred encoding for Vietnamese in modern applications. Windows 1258 does not always round trip Unicode encoded Vietnamese depending on the input order.

[edit] Codepage layout

Only the upper half (128–255) of the table is shown, the lower half (0–127) being plain ASCII. Cells showing combining diacritical marks have a pink background. Other differences from windows-1252 are indicated with a light blue background.

[edit] External links

• Windows 1258 reference chart
• IANA Charset Name Registration of windows-1258
• Unicode mapping table for Windows 1258
• Unicode mappings of windows 1258 with "best fit"
• Michael Kaplan's blog describing the Windows 1258 encoding behavior