When you display or print a document, you see a collection of characters or symbols. A group of characters or symbols (collectively called glyphs) taken together and treated as a single entity is called a character set. A character set may contain hundreds or even thousands of glyphs.

In a single-byte character set (SBCS), a single octet (8-bit byte) is used to represent a single glyph. This means there are only 256 possible bit-patterns or code points available to represent a glyph.

The collection of all 256 code points and the corresponding individual glyph assignments are called a code page. There can be more than one code page for a character set. For example, the set of symbols we use in the United States is different than those used in Sweden. Yes, there are common characters (latin alphabet, numerals, and some "specials"), but there are a lot of differences too. Sometimes the same symbol is used but is assigned a different code point, perhaps because different languages sort the character differently in their alphabet.

The code pages used with a VM system have traditionally been one of the following:

• 037 US/Canada
• 273 Austria/Germany
• 277 Denmark/Norway
• 278 Finland/Sweden
• 280 Italy
• 284 Spain/Spanish Latin America
• 285 UK
• 297 France
• 500 International
• 871 Iceland

In order to accommodate the euro currency symbol, it was necessary to create new code pages based on these, but substituting the euro symbol for the international currency symbol (that no one uses). For example, code page 500 has a euro-enabled equivalent, 1148. The new code page is exactly like code page 500, but the code point 0x9F (the international currency symbol on code page 500) will be the euro on code page 1148.

VM still sends a 0x9F in the datastream to the display. It is then up to the 3270 emulator to determine what character to display for code point 0x9F. What you see would depend on whether your emulator is configured to use one of the old code pages or a new one.

The following table shows each euro-ready code page number along with its matching traditional code page number:

More information at:

• Custom TCP/IP translation tables