{~ CODING special CHARACTERS of the CZECH and SLOVAK LANGUAGES

There are three code pages employed under MS-DOS for this purpose.

An international standard, a part of recent versions of MS-DOS, is the
code  page 852  (Slavic, or  Latin II).  It is  suitable for the other
Central  European  languages  as  well,  as  Polish,  those  of former
Yugoslavia, and Hungarian. It preserves all German characters (this is
necessary, as German names are very common in all this area), and most
frequent French ones from the standard code table 437.

Another  table, most  widely used  on Czechoslovak  territory, is that
introduced  by  brothers  Kamenicky  (it  is  sometimes called KeybCS2
according to the  keyboard driver, and I call it  simply CS here). Its
advantage  over the  previous code   table is,  that it  preserves all
characters over 173  of the standard table (i.e.,  those Greek letters
and  mathematical symbols).  On the  other side,  it is  of no use for
other  languages of  Central Europe,   and that  it deletes  some more
French letters from the standard 437  code page. Its primary virtue is
however  in  preserving  readability  of  Czechoslovak  texts  at some
extent, at  least for experienced Czechoslovak  users, when no display
driver is installed - the characters from the standard (437) code page
resemble somewhat the  Czech and Slovak letters with  the same code in
the CS code  page. The CS code page  has been a necessity for  CGA and
Hercules video adapters.

The third  table was a  part of an  Eastern European norm,  and is now
obsolete; its  name is Koi8CS. (It  is used in modified  forms by some
old Czechoslovak printers and internally by some word processors.)

Another approach is employed by software like TeX - the needed letters
are  composed  from  a  diacritic  symbol  and  a  standard letter. In
WordPerfect, most  special characters of  European languages (and  all
Czech and Slovak)  are contained in its character set  1 - but it does
not mean, that  you can see them on the  display in text mode, without
having a corresponding display driver.

The standard code page (437, English, or "USA character set" as called
in printer manuals) contains only few Czech and Slovak characters with
diacritics.

1993-06-19 Jan Hollan, N. Copernicus Observatory and Planetarium, Brno

PS.

In UNIX world, there is either the true international standard,
ISO-8859-2 (called also ISO Latin 2, short IL2 or il2)
code page for central and east European languages, or,
of course, the Unicode possibility. Microsoft has introduced its
further own code page, which differs just in several characters
from the standard IL2 one.
Microsoft names its code page 1250 (or 1252?), its synonyme is
"windows" code page (short win). For users of MS-windows there arises
a funny situation: the file in Czech/Slovak stored by MS-windows
programmes cannot be well read in the MS-DOS prompt of MS-windows
(as MS-DOS prompt offers the old 852 code page, if any).

October 1999, J.H.