This document describes the basic ideas of I18N; it's written for programmers and package maintainers 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.
The current version of this document is available at DDP (Debian Documentation
Project) page.
Note that the author rewrote this document in November 2000.
This document needs contributions, especially for a chapter on each languages (Characters in Each Country, Chapter 5) and a chapter on instances of I18N (Examples of I18N, Chapter 13). These chapters consist of contributions.
Otherwise, this will be a document only on Japanization, because the original
author Tomohiro KUBOTA (kubota@debian.org) speaks Japanese
and live in Japan.
Spanish language / used in Spain, most
of America and Equatorial Guinea, Section 5.2 is written by Eusebio C
Rufian-Zilbermann eusebio@acm.org.
Discussions are held at debian-devel@lists.debian.org mailing list. (Maybe debian-doc or debian-i18n would be more suitable?)
Introduction to i18n
14 February 2003kubota@debian.org