Kamenický encoding

The Kamenický encoding, named for the Kamenický brothers, was a very popular code page for personal computers running MS-DOS, used in the former Czechoslovakia (today Czech Republic and Slovakia). Another name for this encoding is "KEYBCS2", the name of the TSR which implemented the matching keyboard driver.

It was actually a Code page 437 encoding where the characters from codepoints 128 to 171 were replaced by Czech and Slovak characters, the ordering chosen so that the glyphs of the replacement characters resembled those of the original as closely as possible. All of the block graphic characters of code page 437 remained unchanged (IBM's official code page 852 did not have this property, making programs like Norton Commander look funny with border lines broken by accented letters).

Both of these features contributed to the popularity of the encoding, since text in this encoding, including text that included block graphic drawings, was (barely) readable even on computers with the original fonts (which were often in videocard ROM, making modification difficult, if not impossible), although the result was often funny-looking, e.g. ç instead of č.

The widespread use of the Kamenický encoding was undermined neither by IBM's official code page 852, nor by the introduction, with Windows 3.1, of "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.

This encoding is sometimes called code page 895 (CP895), but IBM use this code page number for a different encoding [http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/software/globalization/codepages.html] and the IANA don't recognise the number at all.

Character table

Only the upper half of the table is shown. The lower half is simple ASCII.

ee also

* Mazovia encoding