New Internationalization and Localization Features

The following new features are available in the current Oracle Solaris release. More information about each feature can be found at Appendix B, Language Support Features and Enhancements.

• Unicode Version 3.2 and 4.0 Support

  Unicode Version 4.0 introduces 1226 new characters over Unicode Version 3.2. This version also includes both normative changes and informative changes as described in Unicode Standard 4.0 (ISBN 0-321-18578-1).

  Unicode 3.2 defines more strict UTF-8 byte sequences as "UTF-8 Corrigendum".

  Code Points	1st Byte	2nd Byte	3rd Byte	4th Byte
  U+0000..U+007F	00..7F
  U+0080..U+07FF	C2..DF	80..BF
  U+0800..U+0FFF	E0	A0..BF	80..BF
  U+1000..U+CFFF	E1..EC	80..BF	80..BF
  U+D000..U+D7FF	ED	80..9F	80..BF
  U+D800..U+DFFF	ill-formed
  U+E000..U+FFFF	EE..EF	80..BF	80..BF
  U+10000..U+3FFFF	F0	90..BF	80..BF	80..BF
  U+40000..U+FFFFF	F1..F3	80..BF	80..BF	80..BF
  U+100000..U+10FFFF	F4	80..8F	80..BF	80..BF

  These sequences exclude the surrogate code points between U+D800 and U+DFFF. The sequences also inhibit any other illegal byte values. To comply with the new definition, Unicode locale methods and the UTF-8 iconv modules are enhanced to detect the newly defined UTF-8 invalid byte sequences. For more informations, see Unicode Version 4.0 Support.

• Auto encoding finder

  The auto encoding finder is a utility for global character handling. Through a general-purpose interface, the auto encoding finder provides an easy way to detect the encoding of a particular file or string. Encoding detection simplifies access to various language character encodings. For example, the utility simplifies the display of web pages that do not specify encoding information. Search engines, knowledge databases, and machine translation tools might also need to detect the encoding of the language data being accessed. The Auto Encoding Finder tool simplifies this process.

  For more information, see the auto_ef(1) or libauto_ef(3LIB) man pages.

• Locale administrator

  The locale administrator enables you to query and configure the locales for a Oracle Solaris operating system through a command-line interface. Using the localeadm(1M) tool, you can display information about locale packages that are installed on the system or that reside on a particular device or directory. You can add and remove locales on the current system on a per-region basis. For more information see Software Support for Localization.

• Locale Creator

  Locale Creator is a command line and graphical user interface tool that enables users to create and install Oracle Solaris locales. Using Locale Creator users can create installable Oracle Solaris packages containing customized locale data of a specific locale. After the created package has been installed, the user has a fully-working locale on the system. For more information, see the following:

  • localectr command at /usr/bin/localectr -h

  • localectr(1M) man page

  • Oracle Solaris Locale Creator

• iconv Code Conversions

  Various new iconv code conversions between single-byte PC and Windows code pages and various Unicode forms have been added. For more information, see the iconv_en_US.UTF-8(5) man page.

• Oracle Solaris Unicode Locales

  New Unicode locales are added to Oracle Solaris. The new locales are available on system login. In addition, all EMEA, Central and South American locales have been migrated to Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). For details, see Supported Locales. For information on CLDR, see Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)

• Input Method Support

  New Internet Intranet Input Method Framework (IIIMF), new Language Engines and EMEA Keyboard Layout Emulation Support has been added. For more information, see: IIIMF and Language Engines and Appendix B, Language Support Features and Enhancements. For more information, see Input Method Features.

• Keyboard Layouts Support

  New keyboard layouts have been integrated into current version of Oracle Solaris. For more information see Keyboard Support in the Oracle Solaris Environment.

• setxkbmap

  A new feature for switching keyboard layouts has been integrated into Oracle Solaris and is available for the Xorg Server. setxkbmap enables switching the keyboard layout simultaneously when using Xorg Server. This command maps the keyboard using the layout determined by various options specified on the command line. For information, see the setxkbmap man pages.