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. It is also used for Polish (as can Windows-1257), Slovak, Hungarian, Slovene (as can Windows-1257), Serbo-Croatian (Latin script), Romanian (before a 1993 spelling reform) and Albanian (as can Windows-1252). It may also be used with the German language, though it is missing uppercase ẞ. German-language texts encoded with Windows-1250 and Windows-1252 are identical.

This has been replaced by UTF-8 far more than Windows-1252 has. As of March 2025, less than 0.05% 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.