YUSCII

YUSCII is an informal name for several JUS standards for 7-bit character encoding. These include:

• JUS I.B1.002 (ISO-IR-141, ISO 646-YU), which encodes Gaj's Latin alphabet, used for Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian language[2]
• JUS I.B1.003 (ISO-IR-146), which encodes Serbian Cyrillic alphabet,[3] and
• JUS I.B1.004 (ISO-IR-147), which encodes Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet.[4]

The encodings are based on ISO 646, 7-bit Latinic character encoding standard, and were used in Yugoslavia before widespread use of later CP 852, ISO-8859-2/8859-5, Windows-1250/1251 and Unicode standards. It was named after ASCII, having the first word "American" replaced with "Yugoslav": "Yugoslav Standard Code for Information Interchange". Specific standards are also sometimes called by a local name: SLOSCII, CROSCII or SRPSCII for JUS I.B1.002, SRPSCII for JUS I.B1.003, MAKSCII for JUS I.B1.004.

JUS I.B1.002 is a national ISO 646 variant, i.e. equal to basic ASCII with less frequently used symbols replaced with specific letters of Gaj's alphabet. Cyrillic standards further replace Latin alphabet letters with corresponding Cyrillic letters. Љ (lj), Њ (nj), Џ (dž) and ѕ (dz) correspond to Latin digraphs, and are mapped over Latin letters which are not used in Serbian or Macedonian (q, w, x, y).

YUSCII was originally developed for teleprinters but it also spread for computer use. This was widely considered a bad idea among software developers who needed the original ASCII such as {, [, }, ], ^, ~, |, \ in their source code (an issue partly addressed by trigraphs in C). On the other hand, an advantage of YUSCII is that it remains comparatively readable even when support for it is not available, similarly to the Russian KOI-7. Numerous attempts to replace it with something better kept failing due to limited support. Eventually, Microsoft's introduction of code pages, appearance of Unicode and availability of fonts finally spelled sure (but nevertheless still slow) end of YUSCII.