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Chapter 5

Characters in Each Country

This chapter describes a specific information for each language. If you are developing a serious

DTP software or planning to support detailed I18N, this chapter may help you. Contributions

from people speaking each language are welcome. If you are to write a section on your language,

please include these points:

1. kinds and number of characters used in the language,

2. explanation on coded character set(s) which is (are) standardized,

3. explanation on encoding(s) which is (are) standardized,

4. usage and popularity for each encoding,

5. de facto standard, if any, on how many columns characters occupy,

6. writing direction and combined characters,

7. how to layout characters (word wrapping and so on),

8. widely used value for

LANG

environmental variable,

9. the way to input characters from keyboard and whether you want to input yes/no (and so

on) in your language or in English,

10. a set of information needed for beautiful displaying, for example, where to break a line,

hyphenation, word wrapping, and so on, and

11. other topics.

Writers whose languages are written in different direction from European languages or needs a

combined characters (I heard that is used in Thai) are encouraged to explain how to treat such

languages.