Language Support

The Solaris 8 operating environment provides support for over 90 locales, a new, intuitive interface for installing languages, expanded Unicode support, and improved data interoperability utilities.

Universal Language Coverage

The Solaris 8 operating environment now includes support for more than 90 locales, covering 37 languages, on both the Solaris 8 Software CDs and the Solaris 8 Languages CD.

The Solaris 8 Software CDs provide an English interface to input, display, and print text in a target language, including multibyte locales. In addition, the Solaris 8 Languages CD provides localized interface and documentation.

This new packaging approach greatly simplifies the development and testing of applications for international markets and eliminates the need to purchase an optional media kit to set up a non-English development or production environment.

Customers will also notice a new locale installation mechanism. In previous Solaris releases the locale support included with the operating environment depended on the software cluster installed. The new installation interface in the Solaris 8 operating environment enables users to install only those regions for which they require locale support.

For more information, see the International Language Environments Guide.

Improved Language Installation and Setup

Users will find the setup and installation to be significantly easier, whether installing only a single language or the full range of 37 languages packaged with the Solaris 8 operating environment.

Changes to packaging on the Solaris 8 CD have reduced the storage requirements for a mixed language installation and a redesign of the install interface makes language selection and grouping extremely intuitive.

For more information, see the Solaris 8 (SPARC Platform Edition) Installation Guide or the Solaris 8 (Intel Platform Edition) Installation Guide.

Expanded Unicode Support

The Solaris 8 operating environment continues to broaden support for Unicode, with the addition of new Unicode (UTF-8) locales for Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Also, complete support for Complex Text Layout (CTL) scripts has been enabled. This allows proper rendering of text for bidirectional and also context-sensitive shaping scripts like Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai in the Unicode locale.

Unicode is often used in a mixed script environment, where it is necessary to display text from multiple languages in a single environment. In those cases where it is necessary to provide support for cultural-specific conventions such as date and time, monetary format, and collation, the multiple Unicode locales provided in Solaris are quite useful.

For more information, see the International Language Environments Guide.

Customer-Extensible Codeset Conversion (geniconvtbl)

Developers have the ability, with the Solaris 8 operating environment, to create user-defined codeset converters, enabling table driven creation and easy addition of new codeset conversions by using the geniconvtbl utility.

This permits user-defined and user-customizable codeset conversions with a standard system utility and interface like iconv(1) and iconv(3C). This new capability enhances the ability of an application to deal with incompatible data types, particularly data generated from proprietary or legacy applications. Modification to existing Solaris codeset conversions is also supported.

For more information, see the International Language Environments Guide.

Improved Data Interoperability

Data interoperability with non-Solaris environments has been improved in the Solaris 8 operating environment with the addition of the following new iconv data conversion utilities :

• iconv for Japanese mainframe data types

• iconv for Microsoft data encodings (including user defined characters)

• iconv for UTF-8 interoperability in People's Republic of China and Korea

• iconv for various Unicode encoding formats and international and de facto industry standard codesets

For more information, see the International Language Environments Guide.

New Locales Added

Two new locales have been added to the Solaris 8 operating environment for Iceland (ISO8859-15) and Russia (ANSI1251). The new Russian locale is in addition to the existing Russian (8859-5) locale and provides native Microsoft data encoding support.

For more information, see the International Language Environments Guide.