Windows-1250 is a code page used under Microsoft Windows to represent texts in Central European and Eastern European languages that use Latin script, such as Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovene, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian (Latin script), Romanian (before 1993 spelling reform) and Albanian. It may also be used with the German language; German-language texts encoded with Windows-1250 and Windows-1252 are identical.
In modern applications UTF-8 or UTF-16 is a preferred encoding. 0.2% of all web pages use Windows-1250 in February 2016.
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 as in Windows-1252 but three of the characters moved (Ą, Ľ, ź) cannot be explained this way, since those don't 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. The part that differs from ISO-8859-2 is compared with Windows-1252 in the table below:
Note: The shaded positions at A2, A3, AA, AF, B2, B3, BA, BD and BF are the same as in ISO-8859-2. Positions which are identical in Windows-1252 and Windows-1250 are not shown.Code page layout
The following table shows Windows-1250. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent and its decimal code.
Legend: