How does international lang support work?

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3 total messages Started by Richard Baughman Thu, 29 Oct 1992 22:30

Author: Richard Baughman
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1992 22:30

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We are in the process of converting the program messages in our system to
provide international language support (in particular, kanji).  We are basing
the implementation on the XPG3 extensions that provide for message catalogs
(through the routines catopen(), catgets(), and catclose()).

My question is:  Does the internationalization support allow embedding 8-bit
ASCII strings within multi-byte and/or wide character strings?  For example,
if my locale is set for Japanese and my program retrieves an error message
from the Kanji catalog with embedded format specs ("%1$s ... %2$s"), can the
parameters be 8-bit ASCII strings (like "my_func")?  Do sprintf/printf support
this functionality?  Any light that can be shed on this subject would help.
(I have read the OSF white paper on "Internationalization Made Easy", but I'm
still not clear on this matter.)

Thanks.

    Rich Baughman
    Boston Technology
    rich@bostech.com

Re: How does international lang support work?

Author: Arne Thormodsen
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1992 18:53

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7-bit (not 8-bit) ASCII is a subset of most multibyte character sets,
including both "Shift-JIS" and "UJIS(EUC)" in Japan.  ASCII and two or
three-byte (JIS0212) characters can be mixed in Japan.  In general,
however, you cannot mix ASCII with widecharacter (as opposed to
multibyte) data because the underlying data types are (probably)
different.

--arne

Re: How does international lang support work?

Author: Chiaki Ishikawa
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1992 10:13

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In article <140950001@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com> arnet@hpcupt1.cup.hp.com (Arne Thormodsen) writes:

   7-bit (not 8-bit) ASCII is a subset of most multibyte character sets,
   including both "Shift-JIS" and "UJIS(EUC)" in Japan.  ASCII and two or
   three-byte (JIS0212) characters can be mixed in Japan.  In general,
   however, you cannot mix ASCII with widecharacter (as opposed to
   multibyte) data because the underlying data types are (probably)
   different.

   --arne

I agree with the above statement.
I refrain from using widecharacter since it doesn't mesh well with
ASCII and I am not sure if the each vendor's implementation is
compatible with each other (not to speak of the byte ordering problem
in some machines). I don't have much experience with three-byte
(JIS0212?) characters, and can't say much about it, but from my
experience of mixing ASCII and EUC codes and the works of others such
as the Japanese EMACS called NEMACS (Nihingo Emacs), it should be
possible without much trouble. 

>From: rich@bostech.com (Richard Baughman)
>
>(I have read the OSF white paper on "Internationalization Made Easy", but I'm
>still not clear on this matter.)
>

	I read an article written by someone at OSF who have done I18N
work and I thought it was well written, but when I think about it now,
it was easy to understand for people who have already have I18N
experience, and may not be easy to understand by people without any
I18N experience. This is a pitfall of I18N we must remember, I guess.
For example, I have only a vague idea how 8-bit European characters
are handled: the way I handle Japanese characters or for that matter
how NEMACS handles Japanese characters won't mix well with 8-bit
European characters. (However, a new version of extended Emacs called
MULE from the same people who have modified Emacs to handle Japanese
characters can handle 7-bit ASCII, 8-bit ISO, and 16 bit Japanese
characters all in one document!).

 Chiaki Ishikawa,  Personal Media Corp.,  MY Bldg, 1-7-7 Hiratsuka,
 Shinagawa, Tokyo 142, JAPAN. FAX:+81-3-5702-0359, Phone:+81-3-5702-0351
 UUNET: ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp

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