Expanded Unicode Support

Sun Microsystems has a vision of multilingual computing in which multiscript Unicode locales play a starring role. Solaris has been a strong supporter of open, industry standards, and with this release offers expanded support for the Unicode standard, v2.0. with six new Unicode UTF-8 locales - French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Europe. (Europe will return the Euro as the default currency symbol.)

Of particular interest to users and developers is the inclusion of multiscript capabilities. For example, in the Solaris 7 operating environment, enhancements have been made to each of the en_US.UTF-8 locales so that users can input and display text from different writing scripts such as Japanese, Thai, and Russian. They can easily switch between the scripts as needed without having to change or install a new locale. Here are some of the scripts users can input and display in when using any locale: Arabic, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Thai, Cyrillic, the Western, Eastern, and Northen European scripts, Turkish, and Greek. In addition, a graphical codeset converter is included for ease in converting user data between the various codesets.