With the advent of Unicode, legacy character encodings have mostly lost their raison d’être, but they are still in widespread use and are clearly not going to disappear any time soon. Reference tables may therefore be useful.
One of the most common ones, at least in Occidental Europe and parts of the English-speaking world, is Windows 1252 or CodePage 1252, Microsoft’s alternative Latin-1 encoding with a few additional characters compared to the standardised version ISO 8859-1, upon which Unicode is based.
The table to the left shows the missing characters in a chart similar to the ones provided by the Unicode consortium. Indeed, you may want to download this as a PDF and put it in the margin of page 577 of the Unicode 5.0 book for easy reference.
Currently, only a few character charts are available as PDFs:
Others may be added later. Please let us know if you would like to see a particular encoding added.
Update 13th August 2008: We have added a complete classic ASCII chart including the graphical representation of control characters defined in ECMA-17, apparently more or less identical to ISO 2047. These control pictures could potentially be releases as a font if anyone is interested.
The tables above were generated using a custom PostScript program which we have made freely available. Please find all the gruesome details about the chart-generating code on a separate page.