Windows-1250

Windows-1250 is a code page used under Microsoft Windows to represent texts in Central European and Eastern European languages that use the Latin script. It is primarily used by Czech, though Czech has now moved to UTF-8 and mostly abandoned this legacy encoding. It is also used for Polish (which also used in Windows-1257), Slovak, Hungarian, Slovene (which also used in Windows-1257), Serbo-Croatian (Latin script), Romanian (before a 1993 spelling reform) and Albanian (which also used in Windows-1252). It may also be used with the German language, though it's missing uppercase ß|ẞ. German-language texts encoded with Windows-1250 and Windows-1252 are identical.

This has been replaced by Unicode (such as UTF-8) far more than Windows-1252. As of October 2022, less than 0.04% of all web pages use Windows-1250.

Windows-1250 is similar to ISO-8859-2 and has all the printable characters it has and more. However a few of them are rearranged (unlike Windows-1252, which keeps all printable characters from ISO-8859-1 in the same place). Most of the rearrangements seem to have been done to keep characters shared with Windows-1252 in the same place but three of the characters moved (Ą, Ľ, ź) cannot be explained this way, since those do not occur in Windows-1252 and could have been put in the same positions as in ISO-8859-2 if ˇ had been put e.g. at 9F.

IBM uses code page 1250 (CCSID 1250 and euro sign extended CCSID 5346) for Windows-1250.

Character set
The following table shows Windows-1250. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent.

{{legend|#FFD|Different from ISO-8859-2}} {{legend|#EFF|Different from Windows-1252 to match ISO-8859-2}} {{legend|#EFD|Different from both Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-2}}