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Chapter 6: Internationalizing Your Application

Internationalization is the process of generalizing an application so that it can easily be customized--or localized--to run in more than one language environment. You can provide internationalized software that will produce output in a user's native language, format data (such as currency values and dates) according to local standards, and tailor software to a specific culture.

This chapter describes how to create such an application. It contains the following major sections:

"Overview" presents an introduction to internationalization and defines some common terms.
"Additional Reading on Internationalization" explains how to set the current locale and limitations of the locale system.
"Character Sets, Codesets, and Encodings" describes various ways of encoding characters, the traditional ASCII being just one of these.
"Cultural Items" discusses the ways in which different cultures affect the way a string can be viewed, for example in outputting or collating.
"Locale-Specific Behavior" covers native language support (NLS) and the NLS database, regular expressions, and cultural data.
"Strings and Message Catalogs"describes how to create and use catalogs of messages to send diagnostic information to users in various locales.
"Internationalization Support in X11R6" describes internationalization support provided by X11, Release 6 (including features from X11R5).
"Internationalization Support in Motif" points to information describing how to internationalize a Motif application.
"User Input" discusses the translation of keyboard events into programmatic character strings for a variety of keyboards.
"GUI Concerns" discusses internationalizing applications that use graphical user interfaces (GUIs)
"Popular Encodings" presents some common non-ASCII encodings.

For a list of ISO 3166 country names and abbreviations, see Appendix A, "ISO 3166 Country Names and Abbreviations." You can find detailed information about fonts in Chapter 5, "Working With Fonts." Also, you can find additional information about internationalizing an application in the Indigo Magic Desktop Integration Guide.

Overview
Locales
Character Sets, Codesets, and Encodings
Cultural Items
Locale-Specific Behavior
Strings and Message Catalogs
Internationalization Support in X11R6
Internationalization Support in Motif
User Input
GUI Concerns
Popular Encodings

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