According to the Law on the Convention of September 13, 1973 on the recording of surnames and forenames in civil status registers[3][4] information in Latin characters is to be taken over true to the letter with all diacritic marks and information in other characters is to be reproduced by transliteration, if possible in accordance with ISO standards.
[5] The text of the predecessor, DIN SPEC 91379,[6] explanations and lists of characters and sequences as Excel and XML files can be found in Koordinierungsstelle für IT-Standards (KoSIT).
[5] This reference contains also an XML schema file with patterns to check conformance of text to subsets defined in this standard.
[8] The architecture guideline for German federal IT demands in the version from July 2022 the usage of the predecessor DIN SPEC 91379.
The informative part determines a UNICODE subset of extended letters, e.g. for legal entities, product names and for data exchange in the EU.
To be compliant to this norm, it is required to Any conforming IT system must be able to process the normative letters in all name fields.
These letters are included for backwards compatibility with the standard Latin characters in Unicode.
The letter NO-BREAK SPACE is necessary to prevent a line break in special names that could change the meaning.
The other letters are included for backwards compatibility with the standard Latin characters in Unicode.
Another application is the creation of search forms, so that names can be found even if they are spelled differently or without specifying the diacritics.
For cross-border data exchange, every IT system should support Greek letters in name fields.
An implementation as an XML schema type is included in the din-91379-datatypes.xsd file attached to the standard.
Achieving this was one of the main reasons for revising these keyboard layouts compared to the previous version DIN 2137-1:2018-12.