Preface

The Solaris Internationalization Guide for Developers describes internationalization features that are new in Solaris^TM .7. It contains important information on how to use Solaris .7 to build global software products that support various languages and cultural conventions.

Specifically, this guide contains:

• Guidelines and tips for developers on how to use Solaris 7 to write applications for international markets.

• An overall view of internationalization topics that apply to various layers within the Solaris environment.

• Pointers to more detailed documentation.

Where appropriate, this guide points you to other guides in the documentation set that contain additional or more detailed information on internationalization features in this release.

Who Should Use This Guide

This guide is intended for software developers who want to design global products and applications for the Solaris 7 environment software developers.

This guide assumes knowledge of the C programming language, and a few chapters discuss X11^TMNeWS window system toolkits.

All operating system information pertains to the Solaris7 SunOS^TM 5.7 operating environment. The hardware platforms covered are SPARC^TM and Intel x86. For the most part, support for these architectures is identical, but a note appears when this is not the case. SunOS 5.6 SPARC architecturex86 architectures (SPARC and x86)

Organization and Summary

The chapters in this guide are organized as follows:

• Chapter 1, Solaris Internationalization Overview, tells what's new and provides an overview of the localized products available on the base Solaris release, the European localized release, and the Asian localized releases.

• Chapter 2, Contents of the Base Solaris Product, describes the contents of the Solaris 7 base product as it relates to locales.

• Chapter 3, Contents of the Localized Solaris 7 Products, describes Codeset Independence (CSI) support for Extended UNIX® Code (EUC) and non-EUC codesets.

• Chapter 4, Overview of en_US.UTF-8 Locale Support, covers the system environment, code conversions, script selection, printing, and the programming environment.

• Chapter 5, Installation, describes the procedures for installing the localization packages.

• Chapter 6, Internationalization Framework in the Solaris 7 Environment, contains details about the internationalization features incorporated into this release.

• Chapter 7, X/DPS, contains a detailed look at the procedures to write a localized version of codesets, formats, collation, and messaging.

• Chapter 8, Desktop Environments, covers the Solaris desktop environments: the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and OpenWindows^TM. The section on CDE has an overview of the application internationalization process, including locale management, localized resources, and font management.

• Chapter 9, Printing, covers printing support under the Solaris 7 operating environment, with specific information for European and Asian printing.

• Chapter 10, Complex Text Layout, includes information about CTL extensions that enable Motif APIs to support writing systems that require complex transformation between logical and physical text representations, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai.

Related Books and Sites

For information about the Java development Kit, seehttp://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/index.html http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/index.html.

Tuthill, Bill and David Smallberg. Creating Worldwide Software: Solaris International Developer's Guide, 2nd edition. Mountain View, California, Sun Microsystems Press, 1997. Available through books@sun.com and www.sun.com/books/. The book offers a general overview of the internationalization process under the Solaris operating system.

Common Desktop Environment: Internationalization Programmer's Guide. Mountain View, California, SunSoft Press, 1996. The CDE documentation set can be ordered by title through SunExpress. The CDE Programmer's guide is also part of the CDE Developer's AnswerBook ^TM set that is shipped on the Solaris documentation CD. Available through the SunDocs program (see "Ordering Sun Documents" Contains information on locale management, font management, distributed networks, User Interface Language (UIL), Xt, and Xlib dependencies.

OSF/Motif Programmer's Guide, Release 1.2. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1993. The Open Software Foundation's (OSF) Guide describes how to use the OSF/Motif application programming interface to create Motif applications. It presents an overview of Motif widget set architecture, explains the Motif toolkit, and gives models and examples of Motif applications.

OSF/Motif Programmer's Reference, Release 1.2. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1992. The Open Software Foundation's (OSF) Reference is the collection of reference pages to OSF/Motif commands, functions, toolkit, window manager, user interface language commands, and functions.

PostScript Language Reference Manual, Second Edition. Adobe Systems Inc., Addison-Wesley, 1990. The standard reference work for PostScript covers the fundamentals of PostScript as a device-independent printing language.

PostScript Language Reference Manual Supplement. Adobe Systems Inc., 1994.

Programming the Display PostScript System with X. Reading, Mass., Adobe Systems Inc., Addison-Wesley, 1993. For application developers working with X Windows and Display PostScript to produce information for the screen display and the printer output.

OLIT Reference Manual. Sun Microsystems, 1994.

XView Developer's Notes. O'Reilly & Associates, 1992.

Ordering Sun Documents

The SunDocs program provides more than 250 manuals from Sun Microsystems, Inc. If you live in the United States, Canada, Europe, or Japan, you can purchase documentation sets or individual manuals from SunDocs.

For a list of documents and how to order them, see the catalog section of the SunExpress^TM Internet site at http://www.sun.com/sunexpress.

Typographic Conventions

Table P-1 describes the typographic conventions used in this guide.

Table P-1 Typographic Conventions

Typeface or Symbol	Meaning	Example
AaBbCc123	The names of commands, files, and directories; on-screen computer output	Edit your .login file. Use ls -a to list all files. machine_name% You have mail.
AaBbCc123	What you type, contrasted with on-screen computer output	machine_name% su Password:
AaBbCc123	Command-line placeholder: replace with a real name or value	To delete a file, type rm filename.
AaBbCc123	Book titles, new words or terms, or words to be emphasized	Read Chapter 6 in User's Guide. These are called class options. You must be root to do this.