ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999,Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 6: Latin/Arabic alphabet, is part of theISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standardcharacter encodings, first edition published in 1987. It is informally referred to asLatin/Arabic. It was designed to coverArabic. Only nominal letters are encoded, no preshaped forms of the letters, so shaping processing is required for display. It does not include the extra letters needed to write most Arabic-script languages other than Arabic itself (such as Persian, Urdu, etc.).

ISO-8859-6 is theIANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with theC0 and C1 control codes fromISO/IEC 6429. The text is in logical order, soBiDi processing is required for display. NominallyISO-8859-6 (code page 28596) is for "visual order", andISO-8859-6-I (code page 38596) is for logical order. But in practice, and required for HTML and XML documents,ISO-8859-6 also stands for logical order text. There is alsoISO-8859-6-E which supposedly requires directionality to be explicitly specified with special control characters; this latter variant is in practice unused. IBM has assignedcode page/CCSID 1089 to ISO 8859-6.^[2][3] It is an emulation for theirAIX operating system.

ISO-8859-6 was used as the reference standard for encoding the Arabic script inUnicode^[4] but is nowtechnologically obsolete.^[5] Unicode is preferred in modern applications, especially on the Internet; meaning the dominantUTF-8 encoding for web pages (see alsoArabic script in Unicode, for complete coverage, unlike for e.g. ISO-8859-6 orWindows-1256 that do not cover extras). Less than 0.0002% of all web pages use ISO-8859-6,^[6][7] and it is not even the third-most popular encoding option for Arabic on the web.

ASMO 708 was devised by the now defunctArab Standardization and Metrology Organization^[8] in 1986 to be the 8-bit standard to be used in Arabic-speaking countries. The design of this character set was inspired by the previous 7-bit standard —ASMO 449 — but it is not simply the 7-bit character set moved to the upper part; there are some differences.

ASMO 708 is abidirectional character set. The lower part of the character set differs from standardISO 646 in the digits and in some punctuation. Depending on the context (whether the numbers are within Latin script or Arabic script), the digits are rendered either as Latin digits or Arabic digits. Also, depending on the context, symmetrical punctuation marks are reversed, i.e., whenever there is an opening punctuation mark, the shape is rendered differently according to the direction of the script.

The upper part of the character set has only the Arabic letters, Arabic punctuation that is different from Latin punctuation, plus few other characters.

ASMO 708 was designed in close cooperation^[9] withECMA, which adopted it as its ownECMA-114 standard in 1986. It was also approved as anISO standard asISO 8859-6.^[10] It was also registered in theInternational Register of Coded Character Sets asIR 127^[11] in 1986.

Some other character sets are related to ASMO 708:

• ASMO 708/French 1^[12] adds French lower case characters;
• French 1/ASMO 708^[12] adds French lower case characters in their ISO 8859-1 code points anddislocates the Arabic ones;
• ISO/IR 167^[13] adds French and German characters;
• Microsoft'scode page 708, for MS-DOS, adds French characters in their typical code points from code page 437 and adds box-drawing characters;
• Both Microsoft's code page 710 (Transparent Arabic) and Microsoft's code page 720 (Transparent ASMO), for MS-DOS, add French characters in their typical code points from code page 437 butdislocates the Arabic characters to allow the box-drawing characters from code page 437 to be in their original code points;
• Microsoft'sWindows-1256 adds French lower case characters in theirWindows -252 code points anddislocates the Arabic ones;

Code values 0xEB–0xF2 are assigned tocombining characters.

• ASMO 449
• ISO 8859
• Windows-1256 (Windows Arabic codepage)

• ISO/IEC 8859-6:1999
• Standard ECMA-114: 8-Bit Single-Byte Coded Graphic Character Sets - Latin/Arabic Alphabet2nd edition (December 2000)
• ISO-IR 127 Right-Hand Part of Latin/Arabic Alphabet(November 30, 1986)

• ISO/IEC 8859
• Computer-related introductions in 1987
• Arabic-language computing

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata