Without further ado, the following was found: Issue: ISO 8859 → ISO/IEC 8859 "For most texts in ISO 8859 character sets, this means that the characters " "outside of ASCII are now coded with two bytes. This tends to expand " "ordinary text files by only one or two percent. For Russian or Greek texts, " "this expands ordinary text files by 100%, since text in those languages is " "mostly outside of ASCII. For Japanese users this means that the 16-bit " "codes now in common use will take three bytes. While there are algorithmic " "conversions from some character sets (especially ISO 8859-1) to Unicode, " "general conversion requires carrying around conversion tables, which can be " "quite large for 16-bit codes."