For
the desktop, most single-display clients operate in a single locale
that is determined at run time from the setting of the environment
variable, which is usually $LANG. The Motif library (libXm) can
only support a single locale that is used at the time each widget
is instantiated. Changing the locale after the Motif
library has been initialized may cause unpredictable behavior.
All internationalized programs should
set the locale desired by the user as defined in the locale environment
variables. For programs using the desktop toolkit, the programs
call the XtSetLanguageProc()
function prior to calling any toolkit initialization function; for
example, XtAppInitialize().
This function does all of the initialization necessary prior to
the toolkit initialization. For nondesktop programs, the programs
call the setlocale()
function to set the locale desired by the user at the beginning
of the program.
Locale environment variables (for
example, LC_ALL,
LC_CTYPE, and
LANG) are used
to control the environment. Users should be aware that the LC_CTYPE
category of the locale is used by the X and Motif libraries to identify
the locale- specific features used at run time. Yet, the LC_MESSAGES
category is used by the message catalog services to load locale-specific
text. Refer to “Extracting
Localized Text” for more information. Specifically,
the fonts and input method loaded by the toolkit are determined
by the setting of the LC_CTYPE
category.
String encoding (for example, ISO8859-1 or Extended UNIX Code
(EUC), in an application's source code, resource files, and User
Interface Language (UIL) files) should be the same as the code set
of the locale where the application runs. If not, code conversion
is required.
All components are shipped as a single, worldwide executable
and are required to support the R5 sample implementation set of
locales: US, Western/Eastern Europe, Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan.
Applications should be written so that they are code-set-independent
and include support for any multibyte code set.
The following are the functions used for locale management:
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