Encodings, character sets and what?

originally computers were only ASCII enabled (suitable for languages with English alphabet)

ISO Latin 1 is now default in most DocBook tools – it well supports Western European languages

characters set = repertoire of available characters, each character has its own code

encoding = rule how to store character codes into sequences of bytes

in past encoding and character set were incorrectly substituted

now we have Unicode and ISO 10646 – distinction is clear

several encodings usually exist for single language: