Hindi Text
Hindi text is written in a script called Devanagari, which means "the writing of the gods". Hindi is a phonetic language, and is written as a series of syllables. Each syllable is built up of alphabetic pieces (the Devanagari characters) of three types: consonant letters, independent vowels and dependent vowel signs. The syllable itself consists of a consonant and vowel core, with an optional preceding consonant. Unlike English, which starts from a baseline, Devanagari characters hang from a horizontal line (called the head stroke) written at the top of the characters. These characters can combine or change shape depending on their context. Like Hebrew, Hindi text makes no distinction between uppercase or lowercase letters.
Keyboard Differences
Not all characters on the U.S. keyboard appear on other keyboards. Similarly, other keyboards often contain many characters not visible on the U.S. keyboard.
Note - On SPARC™ machines, the Compose key can be used to produce any Latin character with a diacritic in any of the supported ISO8859 character sets.
The Compose key can be used with Latin-based locales, but not with Korean, Chinese, or Japanese locales, except the UTF-8 locales.
Any keyboard can be used to input characters from any locale because input is handled by the Solaris operating environment.
Differences in Paper Sizes
Within each country, a small number of paper sizes are commonly used. Normally, one of those sizes is much more common than the others. Most countries follow ISO Standard 216: "Writing paper and certain classes of printed matter-Trimmed sizes-A and B series."
Internationalized applications should not make assumptions about the page sizes available to them. The Solaris system provides no support for tracking output page size. Tracking this is the responsibility of the application program. The following table shows common international page sizes.
Table 1-7 Common International Page Sizes
Paper Type | Dimensions | Countries |
|---|---|---|
ISO A4 | 21.0 cm by 29.7 cm | Everywhere except U.S. |
ISO A5 | 14.8 cm by 21.0 cm | Everywhere except U.S. |
JIS B4 | 25.9 cm by 36.65 cm | Japan |
JIS B5 | 18.36 cm by 25.9 cm | Japan |
U.S. Letter | 8.5 inches by 11 inches | U.S. and Canada |
U.S. Legal | 8.5 inches by 14 inches | U.S. and Canada |