ISO/IEC 8859-6

ASMO 708 was devised by the now defunct Arab Standardization and Metrology Organization[6] 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 a bidirectional character set. The lower part of the character set differs from standard ISO 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[7] with ECMA, which adopted it as its own ECMA-114 standard in 1986. It was also approved as an ISO standard as ISO 8859-6.[8] It was also registered in the International Register of Coded Character Sets as IR 127[9] in 1986.

Some other character sets are related to ASMO 708:

• ASMO 708/French 1[10] adds French lower case characters;
• French 1/ASMO 708[10] adds French lower case characters in their ISO 8859-1 code points and dislocates the Arabic ones;
• ISO/IR 167[11] adds French and German characters;
• Microsoft’s code page 708, for MS-DOS, adds French characters in their typical code points from code page 437 and adds box-drawing characters;
• Apple's Mac OS Arabic re-interprets the ASMO 708 non-breaking space as a right-to-left-directioned space, the currency sign as a right-to-left-directioned dollar sign, and the soft hyphen as a right-to-left-directioned hyphen-minus. It is otherwise an extension of ISO-8859-6.[12]
• 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 but dislocates the Arabic characters to allow the box-drawing characters from code page 437 to be in their original code points;
• Microsoft’s Windows 1256 adds French lower case characters in their Windows 1252 code points and dislocates the Arabic ones;

  Letter   Number   Punctuation   Symbol   Other   Undefined

Code values 0xEB–0xF2 are assigned to combining 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 Alphabet 2nd edition (December 2000)
• ISO-IR 127 Right-Hand Part of Latin/Arabic Alphabet (November 30, 1986)