Preface
The International Language Environments Guide describes internationalization features that are new in the Solaris™ 9 operating environment. It contains important information on how to use this release to build global software products that support various languages and cultural conventions.
This publication describes the basic attributes associated with language enabling, as well as specific features provided by the Solaris platform to facilitate global application development and administration of language services around the world.
Specifically, this preface contains information about:
Where appropriate, this guide points you to other guides in the documentation set that contain additional or more detailed information on internationalization features in this release. You get pointers to how to order Sun documents online, and the typographic conventions used in the guide.
Who Should Use This Guide
This guide is intended for software developers and administrators who want to design global products and applications for the Solaris 9 operating environment.
This guide assumes knowledge of the C programming language.
All operating system information pertains to the SunOS™ 5.9 operating environment.
How This Guide Is Organized
The chapters in this guide are organized as follows:
Chapter 1, Solaris Internationalization Overview describes the new internationalization and localization features in Solaris 9, including the introduction of the euro (
) in several countries.Chapter 2, General Internationalization Features describes support for Codeset Independence, CSI, and the APIs in libc for the Solaris 9 product.
Chapter 3, Localization in the Solaris 9 Environment describes the contents of the Solaris 9 localized product, including localizing the multilingual Solaris product, and new keyboard support, including nineteen new keyboards.
Chapter 4, Supported Asian Locales describes the Asian supported locales, input systems, and character support.
Chapter 5, Overview of UTF-8 Locale Support covers the en_US.UTF-8 locales and the internationalization features incorporated into this release. These include the Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Thai input methods, as well as those for the Japanese, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese input modes.
Chapter 6, Complex Text Layout describes Complex Text Layout (CTL) extensions that enable Motif APIs to support writing systems that require complex transformations between logical and physical text representations, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai.
Chapter 7, Print Filter Enhancement With mp explains printing support under the Solaris 9 operating environment, with specific information for European and Asian printing, and the mp(1) print filter enhancement.
Appendix A, iconv Code Conversions contains lists of tables of available iconv conversions.
Appendix B, Partial Locale Package List on Software CDs contains a table of the partial localization package names on the OS CD.
Appendix C, Full Locale Package List on Languages CD contains tables representing the language packages on the language CD. There are tables for Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, and Shared.
Related Books and Sites
Sun Global Application Developer Corner
For information to help developers globalize their applications, refer to the Sun Global Application Developer Corner (Sun GADC)
The Sun Global Application Developer Corner is an updated web version of the previously released Sun Global Application Developer Kit 1.0. It is accessible at: http://www.sun.com/developers/gadc
Sun's Global Application Developer Corner contains comprehensive internationalization tools and documentation that address various design and development issues encountered while creating global software, including how to test for global compliance and troubleshoot problems.
The site includes testing tools such as the Sun Multibyte English (MBE) locale, which allows developers to test their internationalized applications using pseudo English. This has been extremely useful for English-speaking developers who need to test their applications developed in a specific native language. The Sun Multibyte English locale is available for free download. Other useful resources include sample references and code in C, white papers on international language support found in the Solaris operating environment, technical articles, and useful globalization links for quick reference. There is a checklist available for developers to use to assess the internationalization of a product, as well as a contact page for you to ask any Sun globalization-related queries.
Java Development Kit
For information about the Java Development Kit, see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/intl/index.html