Language Support

The Solaris 9 operating environment now includes support for 162 locale environments, covering 39 languages on the Solaris 9 DVD, the Solaris 9 Software CDs, and the Solaris 9 Languages CD. See an overview of the language support features in Chapter 4. The following section provides more detail on some of these features.

New Asian Locale Support

Support for the New Chinese GB18030-2000 Character Set

Beginning with the Solaris 8 2/02 release, the Solaris platform enables input, display, and print for the entire GB18030-2000 character set (including nearly 30,000 characters). Any application that runs on the Solaris platform can thus benefit from a wider set of Chinese characters. These glyphs are primarily Han characters, but the encoding also includes glyphs for minority languages such as Tibetan, Wei, Yi, and Mongolian.

GB18030-2000 support in the Solaris 9 release also includes backward compatibility to previous Chinese codesets (GBK and GB2312), as well as conversion to other codesets such as Unicode. Solaris developers do not need to change their procedures to access this new encoding support. Standard toolkits can use the new support.

For Java applications that need GB18030-2000 support, review J2SE^TM at the following Web site:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4

New Chinese and Korean Collation Locales

Collation locales provide different collation options to users, such as stroke count and radical, phonetic, and dictionary options.

Wordbreaker Modules for Thai

The wordbreaker module is used to correctly break the Thai text into proper paragraphs, sentences, and words within Motif.

New Asian UTF-8 (Unicode) Locales

The File System Safe Universal Transformation Format, or UTF-8, is an encoding that is defined by X/Open® as a multibyte representation of Unicode. UTF-8 encompasses almost all of the characters for traditional single-byte and multibyte locales for European and Asian languages for Solaris locales.

• th_TH.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Thailand.

• hi_IN.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for India.

• zh_HK.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Hong Kong, China.

New Thai Input Method

The new Thai input method supports the Thai input standard, called the WIT, that is specified by the Thai government. The WIT has 3 levels: level 0, level 1, and level 2.

New Chinese input methods

More popular and powerful input methods (IM) in the Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese locales have been added for new character sets and new locales:

• New Chuyin IM for Traditional Chinese locales

• Cantonese IM for all Chinese locales

• English-Chinese IM for all Chinese locales

New Auxiliary Window for Chinese Input Methods

The Auxiliary window provides an input method user interface (UI) that is "friendly" and extensible for all Chinese locales. New functions that are supported by the auxiliary window are as follows:

• Input method switching

• Input method properties configuration

• Look-up tables for GB2312, GBK, GB18030, HKSCS, CNS, Big-5, and Unicode character sets

• Code table management tool

• A visual keyboard

New iconv Modules

iconv modules enable conversion between native encoded data and Unicode. The following new iconv modules have been added to support new character sets:

• UTF-8 <---> HKSCS

• UTF-8 <---> GB18030

• UTF-8 <---> ISO8859-11

• UTF-8 <---> Hindi

New zh_CN.GB18030 Locale Enhanced From zh_CN.GBK

This new zh_CN.GB18030 locale is provided to support the new GB18030 standard encoding that is required by a new law that the Chinese Government has enacted.

New zh_HK.BIG5HK Locale to Support HKSCS for Hong Kong, China

The new zh_HK.BIG5HK locale is provided to support the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS). The HKSCS, as a supplementary character set of the Big-5 and ISO 10646 coding schemes, contains Chinese characters that are needed in Chinese computing in Hong Kong. However, these characters are not contained in either the Big-5 or ISO 10646 standard character sets.

Japanese Module Support

Additional Japanese iconv Modules

Additional Japanese language support includes iconv code conversions between Solaris Japanese locale codesets, such as eucJP, PCK, and UTF-8, and Japanese mainframe codesets, such as Fujitsu JEF, Hitachi KEIS, and NEC JIPS.

New European Locale Support

New Unicode (UTF-8) Locales for Europe and the Middle East

For the Solaris 8 10/00 release, Russian, Polish, and two new locales for Catalan were added to the European and Middle Eastern locales. For the Solaris 8 4/01 release, two additional languages, Turkish UTF-8 Codeset and Russian UTF-8 Codeset, were added.

In the Solaris 9 release, European and Middle Eastern language support also includes the addition of UTF-8 locales for Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, Finland, and Belgium-Walloon.

The locale names are as follows:

• ca_ES.ISO8859-1 locale is a Unicode locale for Spain (Catalan).

• ca_ES.ISO8859-15 locale is an additional Unicode locale for Spain (Catalan).

• pl_PL.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Poland.

• ru_RU.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Russia.

• tr_TR.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Turkey.

• ar_EG.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Egypt.

• pt_BR.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Brazil.

• fi_FI.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Finland.

• fr_BE.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Belgium-Walloon.

Euro Default Currency Support

The following locales have changed from their national currency unit (NCU) to the euro currency glyph:

Enhanced Dtpad File Open/Save Codeset Conversion

Enhancements include the addition of an "encoding" option to the File Open/Save dialog box that supports file encoding changes with iconv(3C). This option enables users to open or save files in various encodings, such as UTF-8 and UTF-16.