Locale Attributes

A locale contains a language with culturally specific information and conventions for a particular global region. Each process in the Solaris Operating System has the following set of locale attributes:

• Locale settings, which provide the locale and setlocale commands you use to list and set attributes before you start a process from the command line.

  For example, the Korean locales and the English/ASCII locale both have a category that defines the display of time and date according to the cultural format, as well as the actual Korean or English/ASCII characters for time and date.

• Code sets, which support coding conventions for the KS X 1001 and KS X 1005-1 character sets. These code sets enable you to input, display, and print Korean text in file names, system messages, and terminal (TTY), email, and data file content.

• htt input method server, which handles Korean input for the Korean Solaris Operating System. The htt server receives your keyboard input and converts it to Korean characters that are used in Korean Solaris applications.

Korean Locales

In December 1995, the Korean government announced a standard Korean code set, KS X 1005–1, which is based on ISO 10646-1/Unicode 2.0.

The ISO-10646 character set uses two universal character sets:

• UCS-2. Universal Character Set (two-byte form)

• UCS-4. Universal Character Set (four-byte form)

The ISO-10646 character set cannot be used directly on IBM PC-based operating systems. For example, the kernel and many other modules of the Korean Solaris Operating System interpret certain byte values as control instructions, such as a null character (0x00) in any string. The ISO-10646 character set can be encoded with any bit combinations in the first or subsequent bytes. The ISO-10646 characters cannot be freely transmitted through the Solaris system with these limitations.

In order to establish a migration path, the ISO-10646 character set defines the UCS Transformation Format (UTF), which encodes the ISO-10646 characters without using C0 controls (0x00..0x1F), C1 controls (0x80..0x9F), space (0x20), and DEL (0x7F).

The ko_KR.UTF-8 locale supports KS X 1005–1, the Korean standard code set. The locale supports the characters of the previous KS X 1005 code set, all of the 11,172 Korean characters, and the extended ASCII code set. Until the Universal UTF/UCS becomes available, the ko_KR.UTF-8 locale supports ISO-10646 code subset that is related to the Korean characters and fonts . The ISO-10646 standard covers all characters in the world. With the input methods and fonts provided in this release, you can enter, display, and print characters of any language.

In the ko_KR.EUC locale, the EUC scheme is used to encode KS X 1001. The ko_KR.UTF-8 locale supports the KS X 1005–1/Unicode 3.2 code set, which is a superset of KS X 1001. These two locales look the same to the end user, but the internal character encoding is different.

The Korean Solaris Operating System provides simultaneous support for the locales in the following table. The locales look the same to the end user, but the internal character encoding is different.

Table 1–1 Korean Locales

Locale	Description
ko_KR.EUC (ko)	Korean EUC (KS X)
ko_KR.UTF-8 (ko.UTF-8)	Korean UTF-8 (Unicode 3.2)

Korean Code sets

The following table lists the supported code sets for each Korean locale.

Table 1–2 Korean Code sets

Locale	code set
ko_KR.EUC (ko)	KS X 1001
ko_KR.UTF-8 (ko.UTF-8)	KS X 1005–1/Unicode 3.2

Korean Input Methods and Fonts

The Korean Solaris Operating System provides input methods and fonts for all characters covered the ISO-10646 standard. These methods and fonts enable you to enter, display, and print any character in any language.

The following features are supported by the Korean input methods that are available for the ko_KR.EUC (ko) and the ko_KR.UTF-8 (ko.UTF-8) locales:

• Hangul 2 Beol Sik keyboard support

• Hangul 3 Beol Sik 390 keyboard support

• Hangul 3 Beol Sik final keyboard support

• Hangul-Hanja conversion

• Special character input

• Character input using hexadecimal code

For a complete list of scalable and bitmap fonts supported for the ko_KR.EUC (ko) and the ko_KR.UTF-8 (ko.UTF-8) locales, see Chapter 10, Fonts.

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Note –

You can use Hangul or standard Sun keyboards to enter Korean text.

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