Lotus International Character Set


The Lotus International Character Set is a proprietary single-byte character encoding introduced in 1985 by Lotus Development Corporation. It is based on the 1983 DEC Multinational Character Set for VT220 terminals. As such, LICS is also similar to two other descendants of MCS, the ECMA-94 character set of 1985 and the ISO 8859-1 character set of 1987.
LICS was first introduced as the character set of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2 for DOS in 1985. It is also utilized by 2.01, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 as well as by Symphony. It was also utilized in a number of third-party spreadsheet products emulating the file format. LICS was superseded by the Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set introduced by Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 in 1989.

Character set

Codepoints 20hex to 7Fhex are identical to ASCII. For some characters the table also lists dedicated Lotus 1-2-3 compose key sequences to ease character input beyond the Alt Numpad input method.