Multilingual Support in Linux

Multilingual Support in Linux

[Muhammad Asif]

hi,
I need some clear guidelines towards a bit confusing issue. I need to 
evaluate what kind of support/services are available in Linux as in windows 
xp for devloping and viewing Multilingual applications.

Such applications need support both at backend and front end. Currently i 
need more to work on fron-end support. What i can understand yet is some 
services like Regional Settings provided by OS like windows can be used to 
format Multilingual data according to a Locale. Similalry OS should be 
capable of storing/retreiving data in Unicode. I need some 
comparison/feature of Linux what kind of support/services it provides to 
develop/view the multilingual apps?
Do we need language specific distribution of linux to acheive above goals 
or like windows we can change settings specific to locale within same 
distribution?

Comments,URLs, Article or doc will be helpful for detail insight of issue.

Thanks a lot for your time.

Anyz 

Re: Multilingual Support in Linux

[tom potts]

http://www.kdevelop.org/
Is an IDE that will allow you to write programs with
multi-language support.
Tom
 --- Muhammad Asif <mdasif@wol.net.pk> wrote: > hi,
> I need some clear guidelines towards a bit confusing
> issue. I need to 
> evaluate what kind of support/services are available
> in Linux as in windows 
> xp for devloping and viewing Multilingual
> applications.
> 
> Such applications need support both at backend and
> front end. Currently i 
> need more to work on fron-end support. What i can
> understand yet is some 
> services like Regional Settings provided by OS like
> windows can be used to 
> format Multilingual data according to a Locale.
> Similalry OS should be 
> capable of storing/retreiving data in Unicode. I
> need some 
> comparison/feature of Linux what kind of
> support/services it provides to 
> develop/view the multilingual apps?
> Do we need language specific distribution of linux
> to acheive above goals 
> or like windows we can change settings specific to
> locale within same 
> distribution?
> 
> Comments,URLs, Article or doc will be helpful for
> detail insight of issue.
> 
> Thanks a lot for your time.
> 
> Anyz 
> 
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line
> "unsubscribe linux-8086" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at 
http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html 

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Re: Multilingual Support in Linux (and Locales)

[Muhammad Asif]

thx for yr response Tom.

Let me elaborate my concerns a bit more.

I know very little about Linux but i think there are same Locales available 
in Linux now. Locale specific environment variables like LC_CTYPE, 
LC_COLLATE,LC_MONETARY,LC_NUMERIC etc
can be set in Linux. Does setting these variables will cause the data like 
Currency , Thousands marks, month names etc etc  in all application to be 
represented in Locale format ? and this can be done without even restarting 
machine. Thus these Locale variables are alternate to Regional settings in 
Windows? Please correct me where i am wrong.

Secondly Can we set these Locales pragmatically say in Java?

Thirdly, using browser like Mozilla on Linux one can view the Characters of 
all languages (using
UTF-8 encodings) if fonts are installed on client machines. Is it correct?


Thus what are the Linux OS services relating to Locale specific which can 
be accessed Programmatically ideally using Java?



At 10:26 AM 3/20/2003 +0000, you wrote:
>http://www.kdevelop.org/
>Is an IDE that will allow you to write programs with
>multi-language support.
>Tom
>  --- Muhammad Asif <mdasif@wol.net.pk> wrote: > hi,
> > I need some clear guidelines towards a bit confusing
> > issue. I need to
> > evaluate what kind of support/services are available
> > in Linux as in windows
> > xp for devloping and viewing Multilingual
> > applications.
> >
> > Such applications need support both at backend and
> > front end. Currently i
> > need more to work on fron-end support. What i can
> > understand yet is some
> > services like Regional Settings provided by OS like
> > windows can be used to
> > format Multilingual data according to a Locale.
> > Similalry OS should be
> > capable of storing/retreiving data in Unicode. I
> > need some
> > comparison/feature of Linux what kind of
> > support/services it provides to
> > develop/view the multilingual apps?
> > Do we need language specific distribution of linux
> > to acheive above goals
> > or like windows we can change settings specific to
> > locale within same
> > distribution?
> >
> > Comments,URLs, Article or doc will be helpful for
> > detail insight of issue.
> >
> > Thanks a lot for your time.
> >
> > Anyz
> >
> > -
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line
> > "unsubscribe linux-8086" in
> > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> > More majordomo info at
>http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Everything you'll ever need on one web page
>from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
>http://uk.my.yahoo.com

Re: Multilingual Support in Linux (and Locales)

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 11:04, Muhammad Asif wrote:
> thx for yr response Tom.
> 
> Let me elaborate my concerns a bit more.
> 
> I know very little about Linux but i think there are same Locales available 
> in Linux now. Locale specific environment variables like LC_CTYPE, 
> LC_COLLATE,LC_MONETARY,LC_NUMERIC etc
> can be set in Linux. Does setting these variables will cause the data like 
> Currency , Thousands marks, month names etc etc  in all application to be 
> represented in Locale format ? and this can be done without even restarting 
> machine. Thus these Locale variables are alternate to Regional settings in 
> Windows? Please correct me where i am wrong.

They are dynamic and can be set per application. Eg I can type

LANG=fr gnome-terminal &

and get a french terminal on an otherwise English desktop

Re: Multilingual Support in Linux

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 09:16, Muhammad Asif wrote:
> hi,
> I need some clear guidelines towards a bit confusing issue. I need to 
> evaluate what kind of support/services are available in Linux as in windows 
> xp for devloping and viewing Multilingual applications.

Linux uses the Unix locale system. That means you can stick a program
into any translated language you need and can have multiple languages in
use at once (although at the same time in one app is hairy in some
places)

> format Multilingual data according to a Locale. Similalry OS should be 
> capable of storing/retreiving data in Unicode. I need some 
> comparison/feature of Linux what kind of support/services it provides to 
> develop/view the multilingual apps?

Red Hat 8 and higher normally gets run in unicode UTF8 mode (Windows
style UCS2 is too limiting for some roles)

> Do we need language specific distribution of linux to acheive above goals 
> or like windows we can change settings specific to locale within same 
> distribution?

You can change settings per user.

> Comments,URLs, Article or doc will be helpful for detail insight of issue.

One possible place to get a feel for it might be the site at
http://www.arabeyes.org/, which is working on complete Linux in
Arabic. There are lots of other projects/teams such as:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/