Internationalization

The Common Desktop Environment is internationalized to support single-byte and multibyte locales. Developers can write internationalized applications that can be easily localized to run on any Common Desktop Environment platform.

Common Desktop Environment applications (both source and binary) can be localized into regional languages and territories, and across multiple vendors and hardware platforms:

• Latin American

• Western European

• Japanese

• Korean

• Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)

• Thai

• Hebrew

• Arabic

The Common Desktop Environment takes advantage of internationalization features in these standards:

• IEEE 1003.2-1992 (POSIX.2 Annex B)

• X Window System, Version 11 Release 6 (Locales and Internationalization Text Functions)

• Motif 2.1 (Internationalizing and Localizing Motif clients)

• Motif 2.1 CTL (Complex Text Layout) support (required for Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai locales)

If you intend to internationalize your application, you must ensure that it supports input and output of multibyte characters. Also, make sure that message catalogs are used and code can be fully localized.

Demo Programs

The drawing program demo in /usr/dt/examples/template is internationalized. Read the README file for detailed information on this demo.

Related Documentation

For more information on Common Desktop Environment internationalization, see the development environment component man pages and the Common Desktop Environment: Internationalization Programmer's Guide.