taylor@hplabsz.HP.COM (Dave Taylor) (02/24/89)
The following is a summary of the information I've received based on my request for books and other literature discussing internationalization. For reasons of readability I have choosen to summarize all the information into a single article and present the sources for each citation at the end. Please feel free to distribute this message further and if you have any additional information or corrections to any of the information herein, I would welcome a message about it. -- Dave Taylor Intuitive Systems Los Altos, California guest of HP Laboratories: taylor@hplabs.hp.com ------------ Internationalization: Reference Material Available Last updated: February 23rd, 1989 -------- XOPEN PORTABILITY GUIDE: The X/Open standardization body is scheduled to release a new edition of their seven volume Portability Guide (this will be Issue #3), the first three volumes of which discuss internationalization. The release date is February 28th, to coincide with the first day of the upcoming Uniforum conference (sponsored by /usr/group) in San Francisco. These three volumes are said to be a well-done "how to" description of int'lization, but no actual tools are specified in the documents. ANSI C STANDARDIZATION: The ANSI C Standardization effort (under the auspices of the IEEE) includes an interface that supports greater-than-eight-bit character sets, but the people involved in this standardization effort don't believe it is a particularly good implementation. It is expected that other vendors and organizations (X/Open?) will pick up this difficult ball and run with it. IBM "SOFTWARE WITHOUT FRONTIERS": There is also reference made to a document from IBM entitled "Software without Frontiers", but all attempts to track it down with IBM have resulted in naught. The local IBM research library claims no knowledge of it, and searches at other libraries (eg. university) also reveal no further information. [if anyone has further contact information for this document, please let me know.] APPLE "SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL MARKETS": The Apple Programmer's and Developer's Association, a group within Apple that aids application developers on the Macintosh, has a document available for APDA members entitled "Software Development for International Markets". The document reference number is A7G0016 and it is being distributed, still in Alpha Draft version, by Apple Computer to members of APDA only at this time. There is no announced date for the release of the final version of this document, and there is no statement yet from the company relating to whether the book will be offered to non-APDA members. HEWLETT-PACKARD NATIVE LANGUAGE SYSTEM: The Hewlett-Packard Native Language System (NLS) implements a superset of what is discussed in the X/Open Portability Guide, with a set of routines available from C and other languages to create, manipulate, and display messages from a language-definition-indexed "catalog". On a typical HP-UX machine with NLS installed, the following languages are available (though not necessarily used by all applications): american arabic arabic-w c-french chinese-s chinese-t danish dutch english finnish french german greek hebrew icelandic italian japanese katakana korean n-computer norwegian portuguese spanish swedish turkish (n-computer is considered the 'default' language for HP-UX) An end user is able to switch which language environment they're in directly through the use of calls like "nlio(1)" and "nliostart(1)". System administrators can attach the so-called translating server to a specific terminal device through the use of the "nlioinit(1M)" call. Programmatically, there are a number of options that support the standard creation of language-based catalogs, separate files that contain different versions of program messages based on currently active 'native' language. These are then used in lieu of explicit "printf"-style output or "gets"-style input. The NLS system supports 8-bit and 16-bit data and messages and 8-bit file names (eg. 16-bit file names are not supported on the HP machines). Documentation on NLS is useful for understanding this implementation of a native language support system, one sophisticated and powerful enough to support an entire Unix system, including editors and other 'difficult' applications. To obtain documentation on NLS it is recommended that you contact your local Hewlett-Packard sales or marketing office, or find a site that has the entire HP-UX documentation set; there is a reasonable section on NLS in the HP-UX Concepts and Tutorials document. [This NLS summary is a bit confusing; If someone has a better thumbnail description of the NLS system, it would be appreciated] -------- CITATION SOURCES: APDA citation from Jonathan Pool <pool@blake.acs.washington.edu> Posix, and ANSI C are from Dave Decot <decot@hpda.hp.com> IBM "Software Without Frontiers" from Dave Schnepper <daves@dbase.a-t.com> HP NLS citation and description from Dave Taylor <taylor@hplabs.hp.com>