HP Roman

In computing HP Roman is a family of character sets consisting of HP Roman Extension, HP Roman-8, HP Roman-9 and several variants. Originally introduced by Hewlett-Packard around 1978, revisions and adaptations were published several times up to 1999. The 1985 revisions were later standardized as IBM codepages 1050 and 1051. Supporting many European languages, the character sets were used by various HP workstations, terminals, calculators as well as many printers, also from third-parties.

Overview[]

HP Roman is a family of single byte character encodings supporting several Latin script based languages of Europe. It was originally introduced by Hewlett-Packard around 1978 as 7- and 8-bit HP Roman Extension for some of their computer terminals and printers. Early versions of the 8-bit variant were also used by some HP workstations in 1978/1979. Several revisions led to more characters being added before the 8-bit variant of the character set became officially known as HP Roman-8 in 1983.^[1] Soon later, this became the default character set of the HP-UX^[2] operating system and the page description language PCL for inkjet^[3] and laser printers in 1984. The character set was again expanded in 1985.^[4] A modified adaptation of the 1984 definition of Roman-8 was used in the HP Portable series of computers,^[5][6] whereas a derivation of the updated 1985 definition of Roman-8 was used in several early RPL calculators and corresponding thermal printers since 1986.^[7] The latest off-spring of the family is HP Roman-9, which was introduced in 1999 to include the euro sign.^[8] PCL Ventura International is based on HP Roman-8.

Character set[]

Roman Extension[]

The character set was originally introduced by Hewlett-Packard as extended ASCII 7-bit codepage named HP Roman Extension,^[9][10] which existed at least since 1978.^{[11][12][13][14][15]} This character set was used as a secondary character set in conjunction with the primary character set, which was identical to ASCII, except for character 127, which was a medium shaded box instead of the delete character. The first 32 characters, that normally functioned as C0 control codes, also had graphical non-control alternatives, that could appear during self-test or display functions mode. Switching between character sets was done using the Shift Out and Shift In characters, or alternatively, on systems supporting 8-bit mode, using the high bit of the character. Before the name "Roman-8" was established for the 8-bit variant in 1983, this was sometimes called "8-bit Roman Extension" or "HP Roman-8 Extension". Over the years both variants were revised to include more characters. The final 1985 revision of the secondary character set was also standardized by IBM in 1989 as code page 1050 (CP1050 or ibm-1050).^[16]

Although strictly speaking not part of Roman Extension, the following table shows those rows of the primary character set that differed from ASCII. Note that the first two rows are normally the same and only appear as graphical characters in special circumstances, as described above. Although some of the Unicode control pictures conventionally use three characters rather than two, those "diagonal lettering glyphs are only exemplary; alternate representations may be, and often are used in the visible display of control codes".^[17]