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Chapter 2

Introduction

2.1 General Concepts

Debian includes many pieces of software. Though many of them have the ability to process,

input, and output text data, some of these programs assume text is written in English (ASCII). For

people who use non English languages, these programs are barely usable. And more, though

many softwares can handle not only ASCII but also ISO 8859 1, some of them cannot handle

multibyte characters for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) languages, nor combined characters

for Thai.

So far, people who use non English languages have given up using their native languages and

have accepted computers as they were. However, we should now forget such a wrong idea. It is

absurd that a person who wants to use a computer has to learn English in advance.

I18N is needed in the following places.

  Displaying characters for the users' native languages.

  Inputing characters for the users' native languages.

  Handling files written in popular encodings

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that are used for the users' native languages.

  Using characters from the users' native languages for file names and other items.

  Printing out characters from the users' native languages.

  Displaying messages by the program in the users' native languages.

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There are a few terms related to character code, such as character set, character code, charset, encoding, codeset,

and so on. These words are explained later.