Preface

The Solaris Internationalization Guide for Developers describes new internationalization features in Solaris 2.6. It contains important information on how to use Solaris 2.6 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 2.6 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 books in the documentation set that contain additional or more detailed information on internationalization features in this release.

Who Should Use This Book

This book is intended for software developers who want to design global products and applications for the Solaris 2.6 environment. Readers will find the latest Sun-specific information pertaining to this release.

This book assumes knowledge of the C programming language, and a few chapters discuss X11^(R) window system toolkits.

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

Organization and Summary of this Book

The chapters in this book are organized as follows:

• Chapter 1, "Solaris Internationalization Overview," 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 contenst of the Solaris 2.6 base product.
• Chapter 3, "The European Localized Solaris 2.6 Product," describes Codeset Independence (CSI) support for Extended Unix Code (EUC) and non-EUC codesets.
• Chapter 4, "Overview of UTF-8," 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 Solaris 2.6," contains details about the internationalization features incorporated into this release.
• Chapter 7, "Writing Internationalized Code," is a detailed look at the procedures in creating a localized version: codesets, formats, collation, and messaging.
• Chapter 8, "X/DPS," covers the X Windows system's extension with the X Display PostScript system.
• Chapter 9, "Desktop Environments," covers the Solaris desktop environments: the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and OpenWindows. The section on CDE has an overview of the application internationalization process, including locale management, localized resources, font management, localized text tasks, interclient communication, and internationalized functions.
• Chapter 10, "Printing," covers printing support under Solaris 2.6, with specific information for European and the Asian printing.

Related Books

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 set that is shipped on the Solaris documentation CD. Available through the SunDocs program (see page xvii). Contains information on locale management, font management, distributed networks, User Interface Language (UIL), Xt, and Xlib dependencies. See Chapter 9, "Desktop Environments," for a summary of contents.

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 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^TM 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 book.

TABLE P-1

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.

Shell Prompts in Command Examples

TABLE P-2 shows the default system prompt and superuser prompt for the C shell, Bourne shell, and Korn shell.

TABLE P-2

Shell	Prompt
C shell prompt	machine_name%
C shell superuser prompt	machine_name#
Bourne shell and Korn shell prompt	$
Bourne shell and Korn shell superuser prompt	#