1

Chapter 1

About This Document

1.1 Scope

This document describes the basic ideas of I18N; it's written for programmers and package main 

tainers of Debian GNU/Linux and other UNIX like platforms. The aim of this document is to offer

an introduction to the basic concepts, character codes, and points where care should be taken when

one writes an I18N ed software or an I18N patch for an existing software. There are many know 

hows and case studies on internationalization of softwares. This document also tries to introduce

the current state and existing problems for each language and country.

Minimum requirements   for example, that characters should be displayed with fonts of the proper

charset (users of the software must be able to at least guess what is written), that characters must

be inputed from keyboard, and that softwares must not destroy characters   are stressed in the

document. I am trying to describe a HOWTO to satisfy these requirements.

This document is strongly related to programming languages such as C and standardized I18N

methods such as using locales and

gettext

.

1.2 New Versions of This Document

The current version of this document is available at DDP (Debian Documentation Project) (

http:

//www.debian.org/doc/ddp

) page.

Note that the author rewrote this document in November 2000.