DIN 66303

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DIN	66303
Area	Character Encoding
Title	Information Technology; 8-Bit-Code
Summary	Character set standard for character encoding in computer systems
Last output	2000-06
ISO	8859-1

The German standard DIN 66303 is a character set standard, which is used for character encoding in computer systems. The standard DIN 66303 bears the title "Information Technology: 8-Bit-Code" and was established in November 1986 (DIN 66303:1986-11). The most recent edition is from June 2000 (DIN 66303:2000-06).

The character set of the 2000 edition (DIN 66303:2000-06) corresponds in layout and repertoire to the international standard ISO/IEC 8859-1. The still^[when?] often-used^{[citation needed]} forerunner DIN 66303:1986-11 specified two code pages, the General Reference Version of the 8-Bit-Code (German: Allgemeine Referenz-Version, ARV8) and the German Reference Version of the 8-Bit-Code (German: Deutsche Referenz-Version, DRV8).

DRV8 is an extension of DIN 66003 (the German adaptation of ISO/IEC 646) with European characters, whereas ARV8 represents a re-arrangement of the DIN 66003 characters to their internationally used (ISO-8859-1 or DEC MCS) code points.

The DRV8 code corresponds to ISO-8859-1 with certain characters swapped,^[1] such as to make it an extension of DIN 66003 as opposed to of ASCII.

The name "ARV8" is associated with ISO-8859-1 without rearrangement.^[1] Shown below is the common subset of the Latin parts of ISO 8859, which corresponds^{[citation needed]} to the definition of ARV8 in the 1986 edition of DIN 66303.