Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set

The Lotus Multi-Byte Character Set (LMBCS) is a proprietary multi-byte character encoding originally conceived in 1988 at Lotus Development Corporation with input from Bob Balaban and others.[1] Created around the same time and addressing some of the same problems, LMBCS could be viewed as parallel development and possible alternative to Unicode.[1] For maximum compatibility, later issues of LMBCS incorporate UTF-16 as a subset.[2][3]

Commercially, LMBCS was first introduced as the default character set of Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3 for DOS in March 1989[1][4] and Lotus 1-2-3/G Release 1 for OS/2[1] in 1990 replacing the 8-bit Lotus International Character Set (LICS) and ASCII used in earlier DOS-only versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony.[5] LMBCS is also used in IBM/Lotus SmartSuite, Notes and Domino,[1] as well as in a number of third-party products.

LMBCS encodes the characters required for languages using the Latin,[6] Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic[6] scripts, the Thai, Chinese, Japanese[6] and Korean writing systems, and technical symbols.

  1. ^ a b c d e Cite error: The named reference Balaban_2001_LMBCS was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference IBM_CDRA_LMBCS was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Scherer_2000 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Lotus_1989_Compatibility was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Kamenz_1992_DB was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ a b c Cite error: The named reference Lotus_2000_Inside was invoked but never defined (see the help page).