Language Support

Support for the new Chinese GB18030-2000 Locale Encoding

The Solaris platform now allows for input, display, and print of the entire GB18030-2000 character set (including nearly 30,000 characters). Any application that runs on Solaris can thus benefit from a wider set of Chinese characters. These glyphs are primarily Han characters, but the encoding also includes glyphs for minority languages such as Tibetan, Wei, Yi, and Mongolian.

GB18030-2000 support in this Solaris release also includes backward compatibility to previous Chinese codesets (GBK and GB2312) as well as conversion to other codesets such as Unicode. Solaris developers do not need to change their procedures to access this new encoding support. Standard toolkits can use the new support.

For Java applications that need GB18030-2000 support, please review J2SE^TM at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.

For further information, see the International Language Environments Guide in the Solaris 9 Software Developer Collection. For instructions on how to access Solaris 9 documentation, see Early Access in this document.

2/02 

Expanded Unicode Support

The File System Safe Universal Transformation Format, or UTF-8, is an encoding defined by X/Open as a multibyte representation of Unicode. UTF-8 encompasses almost all of the characters for traditional single-byte and multibyte locales for European and Asian languages for Solaris locales. For the 10/00 release, Russian and Polish and two new locales for Catalan are added. For the 4/01 release, two additional languages, Turkish UTF-8 Codeset and Russian UTF-8 Codeset, are added to a table of already existing Eastern European locales. 

For more information, see “Additional Partial Locales for European Solaris Software” in the Solaris 8 Software Developer Supplement.

10/00 

Updated 4/01 

Print Filter Enhancement – the mp Program

The mp program accepts international text files of various Solaris locales and produces output that is proper for the specified locale. The output will also contain proper text layout, for instance, bidirectional text rendering and shaping, as the complex text layout (CTL) is supported in mp. Depending on each locale's system font configuration for mp, the PostScript^TM output file can contain glyph images from Solaris system-resident scalable or bitmap fonts.

For more information, see “Print Filter Enhancement mp(1)” in the Solaris 8 Software Developer Supplement.

4/01 

Thai Wordbreaker

The Solaris 8 1/01 release includes a new text boundary resolution framework for Asian languages. With this framework, CDE applications and Motif libraries do the proper locale-specific text boundary resolution in all locales. The feature, including changes to the CDE/Motif library, is included in libXm.so.4. The Thai text boundary resolution module is a new feature that provides correct word breaks for sentence strings in the Thai language. The Thai locale now supports correct word-boundary handling of Motif widgets.

For further information about the Thai locale, see the International Language Environments Guide.

1/01