ISO 8859-2 (Latin 2) Resources

Disclaimer: The information is provided here in the good faith that you will find it useful. However, we can take no responsibility for its accuracy or usefulness.

Please report any corrections and additions to web-admin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si

I am trying to keep track of additions and updates with localized New! and Updated! signs, taken from Michael Everson's WWW site.

What is ISO 8859-2?

ISO 8859-2 character set is a part of ISO 8859 series of 8-bit character sets for writing in Western alphabetic languages (i.e. Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew and Greek). The series was designed by ECMA (European Computer Manufacturer's Association) and approved as standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

The complete ISO 8859 series is registered by IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority) for use with MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions).

Providing all the neccessary glyphs for writing in Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian (in Latin transcription), Serbocroatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian, ISO 8859-2 provides a viable alternative both to mutually incompatible vendor-specific solutions and to various national standards.

Where can I get ISO 8859-2 fonts?

Linux Console

Andries Brouwer's kbd package contains a set of ISO 8859-2 fonts for a Linux console and keyboard mappings, and is a part of Slackware distribution. You may also want to take a look at Keyboard HOWTO of the same author.

Pavel Záboj's package national should suit the same purpose, but I am not sure whether it is still maintained.

Zoltán Vörösbaranyi <vbzoli@vbzo.li> has made a set of console fonts available on his FTP server.

FreeBSD Console

(Slaven Rezic, Technische Universität Berlin, <eserte@cs.tu-berlin.de>)

Since version 2.2.x, FreeBSD is being shipped with a console font for ISO 8859-2. To select the font, you have to type:

	vidcontrol -f 8x16 iso-8859-2-8x16

G. Adam Stanislav produced ISO 8859-2 keyboard maps for FreeBSD.

PC/DOS

IBM code page 912 has the same layout as ISO 8859-2. Therefore, if you are using PC/DOS 7.0 or later, you can switch to ISO 8859-2 using the standard mechanism for codepage selection under PC/DOS. Dean Domikulic provides the example for Croatian:

    MODE CON CODEPAGE PREPARE=((912) C:\DOS\912.CPI)
    MODE CON CODEPAGE SELECT=912
    KEYB HR,912,C:\DOS\KEYBOARD.SYS

Apparently, other versions of PC/DOS and MS/DOS can utilize ISO 8859-2 simply by taking two files, keyboard.sys and 912.cpi, from PC/DOS 7.0 distribution.

Code page 852 that is usually shipped with MS/DOS, PC/DOS and OS/2 contains all the neccessary characters, but in different positions. You can use GNU recode to translate it from one set to another.

Interesting FTP sites

Universität Erlangen, Germany (starting with README might be a good idea)
Társadalomkutatási Informatikai Egyesülés, Hungary

Microsoft Windows 3.x

Microsoft Windows EE (Eastern Europe) is being shipped with code page 1250, which is not identical to ISO 8859-2. Nevertheless, some came up with their own solutions:

ISO Latin 2 fonts. Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman (roman, italic, bold and bold italic). Truetype and Type 1. Courtesy of Péter Soós, The Order of Saint Benedict, Pannonhalma, Hungary.
latin2.zip (185 KB) - a set of TrueType fonts (Times and Courier in roman, italic, bold and bold italic, Arial upright) developed by Professor Vladimir Batagelj for the needs of the Slovenian Education Network.
ttf_font.zip (93 KB) - Times TrueType fonts (roman, italic, bold and bold italic). Courtesy of Wojtek Szurowski, Sweden.

Microsoft Windows 95

Like Windows 3.x, localized versions of Microsoft Windows 95 sold in the Central Europe are using Microsoft proprieraty codepage 1250. However, TrueType fonts shipped with Windows 95 contain a broader subset of Unicode, and they have been made availabe free of charge on the Microsoft Typography WWW server.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 seems to be able to correctly display and print WWW pages using ISO 8859-2 encoding.

X Window System

Unlike the one for ISO 8859-1, full support for ISO 8859-2 is still lacking in the standard MIT distribution of X Window System (as of X11R6), and very few Unix vendors (perhaps most notably IBM with AIX) provide them as with their systems. In the absence of the official support, groups around Central Europe have come out with their own solutions.

Bitmapped Fonts (BDF)

Biznet Poland, Ltd. produced the full set of ISO 8859-2 fonts for X Window System. The set contains 395 font files and is the ISO 8859-2 ananogue of the set of ISO 8859-1 fonts included with the latest X Window System distribution. The set has been tested to work on numerous platforms and is available on either CD-ROM (price 70,- PLZ) or 3.5" floppies (price 10,- PLZ) from the manufacturer, or can be downloaded free from their site.
The most complete non-commercial collection of ISO 8859-2 encoded fonts has been prepared by Petr Kolar from Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic, and made avaiable on ftp.vslib.cz. The set matches the complete collection of ISO Latin 1 fonts usually found on X11 (Courier, Helvetica, Lucida Bright, Lucida, Lucida Typewriter, New Century Schoolbook, Times and Utopia, all in upright, italics, bold and bold italics, in both 75 dpi and 100 dpi). (Directory removed, archive seems to be gone.) 2002-03-05
X11 fonts, Univerzita Karlova, Prague, Czech Republic. An complete set of Times (roman, italic, bold and bold italic) in standard sizes at both 75 and 100 dpi. Courtesy of Jakub Jelínek. (Directory removed, archive seems to be gone.) 2002-03-05
xfonts (154 KB), Univerzita Masarykova, Brno, Czech Republic. A fine-tuned complete set of Times (roman, italic, bold and bold italic) along with (yet) incomplete Courier and several monospaced fonts, all at 75 dpi. Courtesy of Libor Skarvada. 2002-03-05
LucidaSans Typewriter medium and bold in 10,12,14 and 18 pt, 75 dpi. Courtesy of Jan Kasprzak, Univerzita Masarykova, Brno, Czech Republic. 2002-03-05
X11 fonts from Faculty of Elecronic Engineering, Warsaw Politechnics, Poland. A set of Charter, Courier, Helvetica, Lucida, New Century Schoolbook and Times in both 75 and 100 dpi. Only a subset of ISO 8859-2 is implemented, so they will probably be of little interest to people outside Poland. (Host not accepting FTP connections.) 2002-03-05
ETL fonts designed at Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan for MULE (Multilangual Enhancement to GNU Emacs) contain all ISO 8859-x fonts at 14, 16 and 24 pt (along with numerous others), and are mirrored elsewhere. Courtesy of H. Kagotani and N. Takahashi. (Host not accepting FTP connections.) 2002-03-05
Waseda font collection from the X11R5 Multilingual project, designed at Waseda University, Japan also has a ISO 8859-2 font in the collection. Courtesy of T. Tanaka, Y. Kataoka, S. Matsuda, T. Oya, H. Daikokuya. (Directory removed, archive seems to be gone.) 2002-03-05
X11 Fonts (190 KB) from Institute of Biophysics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. A set of Courier (upright, oblique, bold and bold oblique) and Helvetica (upright) in standard X11 sizes, automatically rendered from Type 1 outline at 75 and 100 dpi. Courtesy of Primoz Peterlin. See also its archive at ftp.arnes.si. 2002-03-05

Scalable (Type 1) Fonts

ISO Latin 2 fonts. Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman (roman, italic, bold and bold italic). Truetype and Type 1. Courtesy of Péter Soós, The Order of Saint Benedict, Pannonhalma, Hungary.
InterSoft from Brno, Czech Republic, has provided a collection of Type 1, TrueType and bitmapped fonts, packed as RPM. Their collection of Type 1 fonts include Péter Soós's fonts.
SuSE CR s.r.o (Czech Republic) and URW++ Design and Development GmbH (Germany) have reached an agreement to ship URW equivalents of the 35 standard PostScript fonts using the ISO 8859-2 encoding with the Czech SuSE Linux 6.4 distribution. The fonts are distributed with the GNU General Public Licence and can be downloaded from ftp.suse.cz. 2002-03-05

Apple Macintosh

(Andreas Prilop, andreas.prilop@altavista.net)

Apple Macintosh uses neither ISO 8859-1 nor ISO 8859-2 encoding. Instead, Apple uses proprietary code tables, namely MacRoman for West European and MacCentralEuropean for East European Languages. WWW browsers on Macintosh (Netscape Navigator 2 and above, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.1) automatically perform the recoding from ISO 8859 encoding used on Internet to Macintosh native character set.

Central European fonts for Macintosh can be obtained from the internationalization/localization area on the Apple FTP server (check either Czech or Polish subdirectory).

Jabolko, d.o.o., the authorized Apple reseller in Slovenia, has made available fonts for Macintosh that use ISO 8859-2 encoding on their ftp site.

How do I use ISO 8859-2 fonts?

Installing New Fonts to X Window System: All the things one has to do in order to make X Window system display ISO 8859-2 fonts. Detailed examples provided for XFree86 (Linux, probably also FreeBSD and NetBSD), HP-UX with VUE and Sun with Open Windows.
How to get proper fonts in Netscape on Linux/FreeBSD (Matjaz Rihtar): How to configure Xfsft and use TrueType fonts like Arial, Trebuchet or Verdana with XFree86.
Running Netscape Navigator with Latin 2 Fonts: From version 2.0 onwards, Netscape Navigator provides support for ISO Latin 2 fonts.
Configuring WWW Server for ISO 8859-2: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP 1.0 is now RFC 1945) is designed to transmit any type of data stream, provided it's tagged with proper MIME header. As the default character encoding for HTML documents (text/html) is ISO 8859-1, your WWW server needs to be correctly configured in order to properly tag ISO 8859-2 encoded documents. Advantages and disadvantages of static and on-the-fly reencoding are discussed. Examples are provided for W3C (CERN), Apache, and Alis/NCSA servers.
Printing ISO 8859-2 Characters: Increasing number of printers already provide support for ISO 8859-2 encoding. Others, including PostScript printers, need filters in order to print the desired glyphs correctly.
Recoding Between Different Character Encodings: An overview of the conversion tools available for recoding from one character encoding to another.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 and ISO Latin 2: Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.0 running on Windows 95 with codepage 1250 seems to correctly interpret WWW pages encoded in ISO 8859-2 (aka Latin 2).