Code page 852 (also known as CP 852, IBM 00852, OEM 852 (Latin II), MS-DOS Latin 2) is a code page used under DOS to write Central European languages that use Latin script (such as Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak or Slovene).
Some of the box drawing characters of the original DOS code page 437 were sacrificed in order to put in more accented letters (all printable characters from ISO 8859-2 are included). These changes caused display glitches in DOS applications that made use of the box drawing characters to display a GUI-like surface in text mode (e.g. Norton Commander). Several local encodings were invented to avoid the problem, for example the Kamenický encoding for Czech and Slovak.
The following table shows code page 852. Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point. Only the second half of the table (128–255) is shown, the first half (0–127) being the same as code page 437. Differences from code page 437 are boxed.
^ "Code Page CPGID 00852" (PDF). IBM. Retrieved 11 Nov 2011.
^ a b "OEM 852". Go Global Developer Center. Microsoft. Retrieved 11 Nov 2011.
^ "Code Page 852 DOS Latin 2". Developing International Software. Microsoft. Retrieved 11 Nov 2011.
^ "cp852_DOSLatin2 to Unicode table" (TXT). The Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 11 Nov 2011.
The Czech orthographic system is diacritic. The caron is added to standard Latin letters for expressing sounds which are foreign to the Latin language (but some digraphs have been kept - ch, dž). The acute accent is used for long vowels.
The double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to by typographers as Hungarumlaut. The signs formed with a regular umlaut are letters in their own right in the Hungarian alphabet—for instance, they are separate letters for the purpose of collation. Letters with the double acute, however, are considered variants of their equivalents with the umlaut, being thought of as having both an umlaut and an acute accent.
The Kamenický encoding (Czech: kódování Kamenických), named for the brothers Jiří and Marian Kamenický, was a code page for personal computers running DOS, very popular in Czechoslovakia (since 1993, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) around 1985–1995. Another name for this encoding is KEYBCS2, the name of the Terminate and Stay Resident utility which implemented the matching keyboard driver. It was also named KAMENICKY.It was based on the code page 437 encoding (with accented characters for Western-European languages) where most of the characters from code points 128 to 173 were replaced by Czech and Slovak characters chosen so that the glyphs of the replacement characters resembled those of the original as closely as possible, e. g. č in the place of ç. This ensured that text in the Kamenický encoding was (barely) readable even on older or cheap computers with the original fonts (which were often in videocard ROM, making modification difficult if not impossible).
A supplemental feature was that the block graphic and box-drawing characters of code page 437 remained unchanged (IBM's official Central-European code page 852 did not have this property, making programs like Norton Commander look funny with corners and joints of border lines broken by accented letters).
Some dot matrix printers of the NEC Pinwriter series, namely the P3200/P3300 (P20/P30), P6200/P6300 (P60/P70), P9300 (P90), P7200/P7300 (P62/P72), P22Q/P32Q, P3800/P3900 (P42Q/P52Q), P1200/P1300 (P2Q/P3Q), P2000 (P2X) and P8000 (P72X), supported the installation of optional font EPROMs. The optional ROM #2 "East Europe" included this encoding, invokable via escape sequence ESC R (n) with (n) = 23. While named "Kamenický" in the documentation, it was originally advertised by NEC as code page 867 (CP867) or "Czech". (However, it was never registered with IBM under that ID, as IBM registered another unrelated code page Israel: Hebrew, based on CP862, under that ID in 1998.) The Fujitsu DL6400 (Pro) / DL6600 (Pro) printers support the Kamenický encoding as well.The encoding was also sometimes called code page 895 (CP895), for example with FoxPro, in the WordPerfect text processor and under the Arachne web browser for DOS, but IBM uses this code page number for a different encoding, CM/Group 2: 7-bit Latin SBCS: Japanese (EUC-JP JIS-Roman) or Japan 7-Bit Latin (00895), and the IANA does not recognize the number at all. The DOS code page switching file NECPINW.CPI for NEC Pinwriters supported the Kamenický encoding under both, code page 867 and 895 as well.The widespread use of the Kamenický encoding was undermined neither by IBM's code page 852, nor by the Windows 3.1 introducing Microsoft Central Europe code page 1250. Only with Windows 95 and the spreading deployment of Microsoft Office did users begin to use code page 1250, which in turn is now obsoleted by Unicode.
The Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set (LMBCS) is a proprietary multi-byte character encoding originally conceived in 1988 at Lotus Development Corporation with input from Bob Balaban and others. Created around the same time and addressing some of the same problems, LMBCS could be viewed as parallel development and possible alternative to Unicode. For maximum compatibility, later issues of LMBCS incorporate UTF-16 as a subset.Commercially, LMBCS was first introduced as the default character set of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 for DOS in March 1989 and Lotus 1-2-3/G Release 1 for OS/2 in 1990 replacing the 8-bit Lotus International Character Set (LICS) and ASCII used in earlier DOS-only versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony. LMBCS is also used in IBM/Lotus SmartSuite, Notes and Domino, as well as in a number of third-party products.
LMBCS encodes the characters required for languages using the Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, the Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean writing systems, and technical symbols.
The Mazovia encoding was designed in 1984 by Jan Klimowicz of IMM. It was designed as part of a project to develop and produce a Polish IBM PC clone codenamed "Mazovia 1016". The code page was therefore optimized for that computer's typical peripheral devices, a graphics card with dual switchable graphics, a keyboard using US English and Russian layouts and printers with Polish fonts. In 1986, the Polish National Bank (NBP) adopted the Mazovia encoding as a standard, thereby causing its widespread acceptance and distribution in Poland. They also were instrumental in Ipaco producing compatible computers with Taiwanese components under the direction of Zbigniew Jakubas and Krzysztof Sochacki.
PTS-DOS and S/DOS support this encoding under code page 667 (CP667). The same encoding was also called code page 991 (CP991) in some Polish software, however, the FreeDOS implementation of code page 991 seems not to be identical to this original encoding.
The DOS code page switching file NECPINW.CPI for NEC Pinwriters supports the Mazovia encoding under both code pages 667 and 991. FreeDOS has meanwhile introduced support for the original Mazovia encoding under code page 790 (CP790) as well. The Fujitsu DL6400 (Pro) / DL6600 (Pro) printers support the Mazovia encoding as well.