Editing Code page 437 (section)

== Internationalization ==
{{Unreferenced section|date=February 2025}}
Code page 437 has a series of international characters, mainly values 128 to 175 (80<sub>hex</sub> to AF<sub>hex</sub>). However, it only covers a few major Western European languages in full, including [[English language|English]], [[German language|German]] and [[Swedish language|Swedish]],{{NoteTag|It also covers some less major Western European languages—as well as some other languages—in full, including [[Basque language|Basque]], [[Malay language|Malay]], and the pre-1999 [[Turkmen language|Turkmen]] [[Turkmen alphabet|Latin alphabet]], but this was likely unintended.}} and so lacks several characters (mostly capital letters) important to many major Western European languages:<!-- I was going to add Dutch to languages with missing letters but can't find which diacritics are really usually necessary for the language -->
* [[Spanish language|Spanish]]: Á, Í, Ó, and Ú
* [[French language|French]]: À, Â, È, Ê, Ë, Î, Ï, Ô, Œ, œ, Ù, Û, and Ÿ
* [[Portuguese language|Portuguese]]: Á, À, Â, Ã, ã, Ê, Í, Ó, Ô, Õ, õ, and Ú
* [[Catalan language|Catalan]]: À, È, Í, Ï, Ò, Ó, and Ú
* [[Italian language|Italian]]: À, È, Ì, Ò, and Ù
* [[Icelandic language|Icelandic]]: Á, Ð, ð, Í, Ó, Ú, Ý, ý, Þ, and þ
* [[Danish language|Danish]]/[[Norwegian language|Norwegian]]: Ø and ø. Character number 237 (ED<sub>hex</sub>), the small phi (closed form), could be used as a surrogate even though it may not render well (furthermore, it tends to map to Unicode, and/or render in Unicode fonts, as the open-form phi or the closed-vertical-form phi, which are even further from the O with stroke). To compensate, the [[Danish language|Danish]]/[[Norwegian language|Norwegian]] and [[Icelandic language|Icelandic]] code pages ([[Code page 865|865]] and [[Code page 861|861]]) replaced cent sign (¢) with ø and the yen sign (¥) with Ø.
* Most [[Greek alphabet]] symbols were omitted, beyond the basic math symbols. (They were included in the Greek-language code pages [[Code page 737|737]] and [[Code page 869|869]]. Some of the Greek symbols that were already in code page 437 had their glyphs changed from mathematical or scientific forms to match the actual use in Greek.)

Along with the [[cent (currency)|cent]] (¢), [[pound sterling]] (£) and [[yen]]/[[Chinese yuan|yuan]] (¥) currency symbols, it has a couple of former European currency symbols: the [[Dutch guilder|florin]] (ƒ, Netherlands) and the [[Spanish peseta|peseta]] (₧, Spain). The presence of the last is unusual, since the Spanish peseta was never an internationally relevant currency, and also never had a symbol of its own; it was simply abbreviated as "Pt", "Pta", "Pts", or "Ptas". Spanish models of the [[IBM Electric typewriter|IBM electric typewriter]], however, also had a single position devoted to it.

Later DOS character sets, such as [[code page 850]] (DOS Latin-1), code page 852 (DOS Central-European) and [[code page 737]] (DOS Greek), filled the gaps for international use with some compatibility with code page 437 by retaining the single and double box-drawing characters, while discarding the mixed ones (''e.g.'' horizontal double/vertical single). All code page 437 characters have similar glyphs in [[Unicode]] and in Microsoft's [[Windows glyph list 4|WGL4]] character set, and therefore are available in most fonts in [[Microsoft Windows]], and also in the default VGA font of the [[Linux]] kernel, and the [[Universal Character Set|ISO 10646]] fonts for [[X Window System|X11]].