New to this release is the Wubi input method, support for the 3.2 version of the Unicode Standard, and improvements to the mp print filter. This filter replaces the xetops and the xutops utilities.
Wubi Input Method. One of the main advantages of Wubi and other shape-based input methods is a very low repetition rate. A single Wubi code seldom represents more than one character, meaning that you can enter text more quickly.
Under the authorization of Wangma Company, the following Wubi features are available in the Solaris 10 release:
GB18030-2000 character set support – The GB18030 Chinese character set is the national character encoding standard issued by Chinese government in 2000. The Wubi input method supports the GB18030-2000 character set. Wubi makes working with the smaller character sets contained in GB18030-2000 easier.
Easy character set switching – Solaris Wangma Wubi divides GB18030 into three character sets: GB2312, GBK and GB18030. You can use keyboard shortcuts to switch between character sets as you type.
New radical mechanism for Simplified and Traditional Chinese. – Patented by professor Wang Yongmin, who invented the Wubi input method, this new mechanism was developed from the old radical system, version 86. With no additional training, users of Wubi version 86 can access three times more characters of the same encoding and the same typing rules.
Unicode 3.2 support. The zh_CN.UTF-8 (zh.UTF-8) locale has been updated to support the new 3.2 version of the Unicode Standard. The new version introduces an additional 1,016 new characters and contains various normative and informative changes.
Unicode 3.2 also defines the following newly invalid UTF-8 byte sequences:
0xED as the first byte.
0xA0 to 0xBF as the second byte.
These sequences exclude the surrogate code points between U+D800 and U+DFFF. To comply with the new definition, the Simplified UTF-8 iconv modules have been enhanced to detect the newly defined UTF-8 invalid byte sequences.
In the current Solaris release, the mp printing utility replaces the xetops and the xutops utilities.
The xetops and xutops printing utilities are no longer supported in the Solaris Operating System. The utilities were formerly used to convert Simplified Chinese text files to PostScript. The conversion enabled the printing of Simplified Chinese characters to PostScript printers with no resident Asian fonts. The xetops utility was used in the zh_CN.EUC/zh locale and in the zh_CN.GBK/zh.GBK locale. The xutops utility was used in the zh_CN.UTF-8/zh.UTF-8 locale.
The mp printing utility was first released with the Solaris 9 Operating System.