Windows-1257
Windows-1257 is an 8-bit, single-byte extended ASCII code page used to support the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian languages under Microsoft Windows. In Lithuania, it is standardised as LST 1590-3, alongside a modified variant named LST 1590-4.
The label
Windows-1257 was registered with IANA in 1996, citing a publication of the specification in 1995 and inclusion with pan-European versions of Windows 95. The later ISO 8859-13 encoding is similar, but differs in reserving the range 0x80-9F for control characters, and accordingly locating certain quotation marks at codepoints 0xA1, 0xA5, 0xB4 and 0xFF instead. Windows-1257 is not compatible with the older ISO 8859-4 and ISO 8859-10 encodings. For the letters of the Estonian alphabet, Windows-1257 is compatible with IBM-922.IBM uses code page 1257 for Windows-1257.
As with many other code pages, the languages supported in this code page can be supported in other code pages. The Estonian language can be written with Windows-1252. It is possible, but unusual, to write Polish, Slovene, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish and German using this code page. The German specific characters will be identical to those encoded in Windows-1252.
Unicode is preferred to Windows-1257 in modern applications.