Support for the GB18030 Standard [11i v1.6]

GB18030 is officially referred to as “Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2000: Information Technology - Chinese Ideograms Coded Character Set for Information Interchange - Extension for the Basic Set”. It is a government mandated conformance requirement for all products sold in China, effective as of September 1, 2001.

GB18030 is a superset Chinese character set standard, including some 30,000 characters that have been defined in either the GB2312-80 standard, the GBK specification, or in Unicode's Unihan Extension A.

System level support is provided to allow for the input, storage, retrieval, display and printing of the set of characters defined in the GB18030 character set standard.

GB18030 support is provided in the HP-UX 11i Version 1.6 release with addition of new locales, iconv converters and fonts as well as modifications to Xlib, CDE, input methods, printer model files, ldterm, and the eucset (1) command. The following changes have occurred:

A new locale, zh_CN.gb18030, is provided to enable support of GB18030.
New iconv converter tables have been provided to support data conversion between GB18030, Unicode and UTF-8. The new converter tables available are:
- gb18030 <-> ucs2
- gb18030 <-> utf8
The eucset(1) command is now enhanced to set the code widths required for GB18030 that are used by the Streams PTY line discipline module (ldterm) and dtterm.
X11R6 has been enhanced to support GB18030.
CDE provides support for the new Chinese locale, zh_CN.gb18030. Users are able to select the new locale at the time of login. CDE provides localization of all CDE components similar to the zh_CN.hp15CN locale and the user is able to input, display and print GB18030 characters.
The Steams PTY line discipline module (ldterm) has been modified to support GB18030. It is activated by the eucset command and is used by dtterm to process and display GB18030 characters. There is no direct user interaction with this driver.
Two new bitmap fonts have been provided to display all of the characters defined in GB18030 in CDE and the X Window System. The Simplified Chinese input method, XSIM, has been enhanced to generate all GB18030 characters. The printer model file is also enhanced to print all the GB18030 characters on PCL5-capable LaserJet printers even if the printer does not contain any simplified Chinese fonts.
Table 2-18 “Bitmap Fonts” illustrates the two new bitmap fonts that are provided under /usr/lib/X11/fonts/hp_chinese_s/75dpi as well as in fonts.alias.
Table 2-18 Bitmap Fonts
Filename
Fontname
song18u.pcf -hp-song-medium-r-normal--18-180-75-75-c-160-iso10646.2000-cn
song24u.pcf -hp-song-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-c-240-iso10646.2000-cn

song18u.pcf and song24u.pcf contain all the 2-byte and 4-byte characters whose patterns are defined in GB18030, including Mongolian, Tibetan, Yi, and Uigur characters. Those characters are assigned to the code points defined in ISO10646-1:2000. The fonts are designed to be used for simplified Chinese so that font names include -cn in the CHARSET_ENCODING field to distinguish them from other ISO10646-1:2000 fonts designed for other regions or countries.

The following information applies to this new support:

The base GB18030 offering (installed on all systems) requires approximately 25 MB.
No additional memory requirements are needed for running in the zh_CN.gb18030 locale.
Applications must elect to enable GB18030 support by setting the LANG environment variable to the zh_CN.gb18030 locale.
Systems level software localization support for GB18030 is provided at the same level as for the other supported Simplified Chinese locales: zh_CN.hp15CN and zh_CN.utf8.

Support for the GB18030 Standard [11i v1.6]

Technical documentation

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