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The I18N and L10N

The international support for the application software is done in 2 steps:

Here, I18N stands for "internationalization" and L10N stands for "localization". (There are 18 and 10 letters between I and N or L and N.)

The modern software such as Gnome and KDE which are written to handle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8 ]data and to provide their message through the gettext(1) infrastructure are multilingualized and can be localized simply by setting pertinent environment variables to the appropriate locale if the corresponding translated message packages are installed.

The simplest representation of the text data is ASCII which is sufficient for English and uses less than 127 characters (representable with 7 bits). In order to support much more characters for the international support, many character encoding systems have been invented. The modern and sensible encoding system is UTF-8 which can handle practically all the characters known to the human (see: @{@basicsofencoding@}@).

See [http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ Introduction to i18n] for details.

The international hardware support is enabled with localized hardware configuration data.

The keyboard input

The Debian system can be configured to work with many international keyboard arrangements:

List of keyboard reconfiguration methods.

environment

command

Linux console

dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low console-data

X Window

dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low xserver-xorg

This will support keyboard input for accented characters of many European languages with its dead-key function. For Asian languages, you need more complicated input method support such as scim discussed next.

The input method support with scim

Setup of multilingual input for the Debian system is simplified by using the SCIM family of packages with the im-switch package. The list of SCIM packages are:

List of input method supports with scim.

1

2

package

popcon

locale

scim-anthy

9

Japanese

scim-canna

5

, ,

scim-skk

2

, ,

scim-prime

0

, ,

scim-tables-ja

*133

, , (not useful)

scim-tables-zh

*388

Chinese (for zh_*)

scim-pinyin

*333

, , (for zh_CN)

scim-chewing

*177

, , (for zh_TW)

scim-hangul

*54

Korean

scim-tables-ko

*43

, ,

scim-thai

*23

Thai

scim-m17n

*95

Multilingual: Indic, Arabic and others

scim-tables-additional

*92

, ,

scim-uim

*65

, ,

The kinput2 method and other locale dependent Asian classic input methods still exist but are not recommended for the modern UTF-8 X environment. The uim tool chain is an alternative approach for the international input method for the modern UTF-8 X environment which is also capable for non-X environment.

An example for Japanese

I find the Japanese input method started under English environment (en_US.UTF-8) very useful. Here is how I did it with SCIM.

(!) In order to start SCIM under the non-CJK and non-en_US locale, you need to add list of those locales in UTF-8 to the ~/.scim/global or /etc/scim/global file as:

/SupportedUnicodeLocales = en_US.UTF-8,en_GB.UTF_8,fr_FR.UTF-8

Please note:

For the detail of setup, see /usr/share/doc/im-switch/README.Debian.gz, /usr/share/doc/scim/README.Debian.gz or /usr/share/doc/uim/README.Debian.gz. Here key points are described.

Disabling the input method

If you wish to input without going through XIM, set XMODIFIERS value to "none" while starting a program. This may be the case if you use Japanese input infrastructure egg on emacs. From shell, execute as:

$ XMODIFIERS=none emacs

In order to adjust the command executed by the Debian menu, place customized configuration in /etc/menu following method described in /usr/share/doc/menu/html .

The display output

Linux console can only display limited characters. (You need to use special terminal program such as jfbterm to display non-European languages on the non-X console.)

X Window can display any characters in the UTF-8 as long as required font data exists. (The encoding of the original font data is taken care by the X Window system and transparent to the user.)

The locale

The following will focus on the locale for applications run under X Window environment started from the gdm.

Basics of encoding

The environment variable "LANG=xx_YY.ZZZZ" sets the locale to language code "xx", country code "yy", and encoding "ZZZZ" (see: @{@langvariable@}@).

Current Debian system normally sets the locale as "LANG=xx_YY.UTF-8". This uses the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8] encoding with the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode Unicode] character set. This [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8] encoding system is a multibyte code system and uses code points smartly. The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII ASCII] data, which consist only with 7-bit range codes, are always valid UTF-8 data consisting only with 1 byte per character.

Previous Debian system used to set the locale as "LANG=C" or "LANG=xx_YY".

Actual traditional encoding system used for "LANG=xx_YY" can be identified by checking "/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED". For example, "en_US" uses "ISO-8859-1" encoding and "fr_FR@euro" uses "ISO-8859-15" encoding.

{i} For meaning of encoding values, see: @{@listofencodingvauesandtheirusage@}@ .

Rationale for UTF-8 locale

The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8] encoding is the modern and sensible text encoding system for I18N and enables to represent [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode Unicode] characters, i.e., practically all characters known to human. UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes.

I recommend to use [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8] locale for your desktop, e.g., "LANG=en_US.UTF-8". The first part of the locale determines messages presented by applications. For example, gedit(1) (text editor for the GNOME Desktop) under "LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8" locale can display and edit Chinese character text data while presenting menus in French, as long as required fonts and input methods are installed.

I also recommend to set the locale only using LANG environment variable. I do not see much benefit of setting a complicated combination of LC_* variables (see locale(1) manpage) under UTF-8 locale.

Even plain English text may contain non-ASCII characters, e.g. left and right quotation marks are not available in ASCII:

“double quoted text”
‘single quoted text’

When [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII ASCII] plain text data is converted to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8] one, it has exactly the same content and size as the original ASCII one. So you loose nothing by deploying UTF-8 locale.

Some programs consume more memory after supporting I18N. This is because they are coded to use [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32/UCS-4 UTF-32(UCS4)] internally to support Unicode for speed optimization and consume 4 bytes per each ASCII character data independent of locale selected. Again, you loose nothing by deploying UTF-8 locale.

The vendor specific old non-UTF-8 encoding systems tend to have minor but annoying differences on some characters such as graphic ones for many countries. The deployment of the UTF-8 system by the modern OSs practically solved these conflicting encoding issues.

The reconfiguration of the locale

In order for the system to access a particular locale, the locale data must be compiled from the locale database. (The Debian system does not come with all available locales pre-compiled unless you installed the locales-all package.) The full list of supported locales available for compiling are listed in /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED. This lists all the proper locale names. The following will list all the available UTF-8 locales already compiled to the binary form:

$ locale -a

The following command execution will reconfigure locale package:

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

The list of available locale should include "en_US.UTF-8" and all the interesting languages with "UTF-8".

The recommended default locale is "en_US.UTF-8" for US English. For other languages, please make sure to chose locale with "UTF-8". Any one of these settings can handle any international characters.

(!) Although setting locale to "C" will use US English message, it handles only ASCII characters.

Configuring system with LANG

The environment variable LANG is:

{i} It is good idea to install system wide default locale as "en_US.UTF-8" for maximum compatibility.

Specific locale only under X Window

You can chose specific locale only under X Window irrespective of your system wide default locale. This should provide your best desktop experience with stability.

This way, you can always access functioning character terminal with readable messages even when X Window system is not working. This becomes essential for languages which use non-roman characters such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

For gdm, you can select different locale for the X session from its menu independent of the system default locale value in the /etc/defaults/locale.

You can set the locale of the X session manager and the value for the default locale permanently using PAM customization (see: @{@pamandnss@}@) as follows. (There may be another way available as the improvement of X session manager package but please read following as the generic and basic method of setting the locale.)

First, change the following line defining language environment variable in its PAM configuration file, such as /etc/pam.d/gdm:

auth    required        pam_env.so read_env=1 envfile=/etc/default/locale

into

auth    required        pam_env.so read_env=1 envfile=/etc/default/locale-x

Then create a /etc/defaults/locale-gdm file with "-rw-r--r-- 1 root root" permission containing, eg. for Japanese message:

LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8"

and keep the default /etc/defaults/locale file for other programs being:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

This is the most generic technique to customize locale.

Alternatively for this case, you may simply change locale using the $HOME/.xsessionrc file.

Filename encoding

For cross platform data exchanges, you may need to mount some file system with particular encodings. For example, the mount(8) command for vfat filesystem assumes [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 CP437] if used without option. You need to provide explicit mount option to use [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_932 CP932] for filenames.

(!) When auto-mounting a hot-pluggable USB memory stick under modern desktop environment such as Gnome, you may provide such mount option by right clicking the icon on the desktop, click "Drive" tab, click to expand "Setting", and entering "utf8" to "Mount options:". The next time this memory stick is mounted, mount with UTF-8 is enabled.

(!) If you are upgrading system or moving disk drives from older non-UTF-8 system, file names with non-ASCII characters may be encoded in the historic and deprecated encodings such as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1 ISO-8859-1] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUC eucJP]. Please seek help of text conversion tools to convert them to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 UTF-8]. See: @{@textdataconversiontools@}@ .

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_(software) Samba] uses Unicode for newer clients (Windows NT, 200x, XP) but uses CP850 as default for older clients (DOS and Windows 9x/Me clients). This default for older clients can be changed using "dos charset" in the /etc/samba/smb.conf file, e.g., to CP932 for Japanese.

Localized messages and translated documentation

Translations exist for many of the text messages and documents that are displayed in the Debian system, such as error messages, standard program output, menus, and manual pages. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettext GNU gettext(1) command tool chain] is used as the backend tool for most translation activities.

The aptitude list under "Tasks" -> "Localization" provide extensive list of useful binary packages which add localized messages to applications and provide translated documentation.

For example, you can obtain the localized message for manpage by installing the manpages-<LANG>. To read the Italian-language manpage for <programname>, execute

LANG=it_IT.UTF-8 man <programname>

to read it from /usr/share/man/it/.

Effects of locale

The sort order of characters with sort(1) is affected by the language choice of the locale. Spanish and English locale sort differently.

The date format of ls(1) is affected by the locale. The date format of "LANG=C ls -l" and "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" are different.

Number punctuation are different for locale. For example, in English locale, one thousand one point one is displayed as "1,000.1" while in German locale, it is displayed as "1.000,1". You see this difference in spreadsheet program.