Unicode Locale: en_US.UTF-8 Support Overview

The en_US.UTF-8 locale is a significant Unicode locale in the Solaris 8 product. It supports and provides multiscript processing capability by using UTF-8 as its codeset. It can input and output text in multiple scripts. This was the first locale with this capability in the Solaris operating environment.

UTF-8 is a file system safe Universal Character Set Transformation Format of Unicode / ISO/IEC 10646-1 formulated by X/Open-Uniforum Joint Internationalization Working Group (XoJIG) in 1992 and approved by ISO and IEC, as Amendment 2 to ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 in 1996. This standard has been adopted by the Unicode Consortium, the International Standards Organization, and the International Electrotechnical Commission as a part of Unicode 2.0 and ISO/IEC 10646-1.

en_US.UTF-8 supports computation for every code point value, which is defined in Unicode 3.0 and ISO/IEC 10646-1. In the Solaris 8 environment, language script support is not limited to pan-European locales, but also includes Asian scripts such as Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese. Due to limited font resources, Solaris 8 software includes only character glyphs from the following character sets:

• ISO 8859-1 (most Western European languages, such as English, French, Spanish, and German)

• ISO 8859-2 (most Central European languages, such as Czech, Polish, and Hungarian)

• ISO 8859-4 (Scandinavian and Baltic languages)

• ISO 8859-5 (Russian)

• ISO 8859-6 (Arabic, including many more presentation form character glyphs)

• ISO 8859-7 (Greek)

• ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew)

• ISO 8859-9 (Turkish)

• TIS 620.2533 (Thai, including many more presentation form character glyphs)

• ISO 8859-15 (most Western European languages with euro sign)

• GB 2312-1980 (Simplified Chinese)

• Big5 (Traditional Chinese)

• JIS X0201-1976, JIS X0208-1983 (Japanese)

• KS C 5601-1992 Annex 3 (Korean)

If a user displays characters for which the en_US.UTF-8 locale does not have corresponding glyphs, the locale displays 'no-glyph' glyph instead, as in the following example:

Starting with the Solaris 8 environment, the locale is available for all clusters except the Core cluster.

Exactly the same level of en_US.UTF-8 locale support is provided for both 64-bit and 32-bit Solaris systems.

Motif and CDE desktop applications and libraries support the en_US.UTF-8 locale. However, OpenWindows, XView, and, OPENLOOK DeskSet applications and libraries do not support the en_US.UTF-8 locale.