Re: Locales, Unicode, NLS, i18n????
Renato Serodio wrote:
> I'm a Debian user, Portuguese by nationality, living in
> Germany, working and coding in English, speaking
> additionally Russian.
>
> Now, I keep everything in the system in English, without
> special characters of any kind. I want, nonetheless, to be
> able to read and write in the languages above.
I think the only character set that includes the alphabets
of all these four languages is ISO-10646 (aka Unicode).
The typical character encoding to use in this case is UTF-8.
Ideally I think you want to set the environment variable
"LANG" to "en_DE.utf8" (and if that locale doesn't exist, to
"en_GB.utf8" instead), and "LANGUAGE" to "en:pt:de:ru"
(more on principle than with any expected visible effect).
> Some pieces of software still fail to work as I wish, or
> have problems coping with all the languages at the same
> time, and I'd like to understand if the problem is
> improper setup, or simply unsupported features.
It is unfortunately likely that it is errors in the
programs, but you should be more specific.
> Well, looking through the documents got me even more
> confused - there appear to be a lot of ways to implement
> languages other than English, and I'm totally at a loss
> trying to figure out if, how and why they are related.
>
> Can anyone give some pointers to help clear this out?
> Links to solid, reference docs would also be appreciated.
The Right Way(tm) to internationalise programs is to use the
GNU Gettext library - if you really want a simplified
explanation. The relevant reading material is gettext(3),
setlocale(3) and man-pages referred by these two.
For documentation the solution is not quite as obvious, but
my preference is to have a tool that can extract a Gettext
POT file with the texts from the original documentation file
and another one, which uses as Gettext PO file to substitute
the texts in the original documentation file with their
translations.
Jacob
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