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MIK is a Cyrillic code page to be used with MS-DOS. It is based on the character set used in the Bulgarian Pravetz 16 IBM PC compatible system.

This is the most widespread DOS/OEM code page used in Bulgaria, rather than CP855, CP866 or CP872.

Almost every DOS program created in Bulgaria, which has Bulgarian strings in it, was using MIK as encoding, and many such programs are still in use.

Code page layout

Only the upper half (128–255) of the table is shown, the lower half (0–127) being plain ASCII.

Notes for implementors of mapping tables to Unicode

Implementors of mapping tables to Unicode should note that the MIK Code page unifies some characters:

1. ^ 0xE1 is both the German sharp S (U+00DF, ß) and the Greek lowercase beta (U+03B2, β);
2. ^ 0xE4 is both the n-ary summation sign (U+2211, ∑) and the Greek uppercase sigma (U+03A3, Σ);
3. ^ 0xE6 is both the micro sign (U+00B5, µ) and the Greek lowercase mu (U+03BC, μ);
4. ^ 0xEA is both the Ohm sign (U+2126, Ω) and the Greek uppercase omega (U+03A9, Ω);
5. ^ 0xEE is both the element-of sign (U+2208, ∈) and the Greek lowercase epsilon (U+03B5, ε)!

Binary character manipulations

The MIK code page maintains in alphabetical order all Cyrillic letters which enables very easy character manipulation in binary form:

10xx xxxx - is a Cyrillic Letter

100x xxxx - is an Upper-case Cyrillic Letter

101x xxxx - is a Lower-case Cyrillic Letter

In such case testing and character manipulating functions as:

IsAlpha(), IsUpper(), IsLower(), ToUpper() and ToLower(),

are bit operations and sorting is by simple comparison of character values.

External links

For more information about the origins of the characters unification have a look at Unicode Consortium's mappings between IBM's code pages and Unicode

Similar information about the characters unification is given in Markus Kuhn's UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux

For more information about the range of 0xE0 to 0xFF please see the Microsoft Code Page 437 reference chart