I18n

Internationalization

(in-progress) #5 #6 #33

Zephyr's concession to internationalization basically consists of declaring character sets.

Version 3.0 adds two new header fields fields, the second of which is a 16-bit number (kind of a waste really), that represents the MibEnum number of a character set. (Go look it up at IANA.ORG). In practice this MUST be either 0 (for Unspecified), 4 for ISO-8859-1 (The defacto standard in most current zephyr usage), or 106 for UTF-8 (the only reasonable thing going forward if the payload is representing text).

zwrite and zaway now have a -x option for specifying the outgoing character set.

zwgc should get a similar option. At the moment, it merely sticks a variable charset into the zwgc.desc context. That variable should be called notice_charset, and the deduced tty output charset should be in a variable called tty_charset, will of course be overridable by zwgc.desc. Tty output will be transliterated from notice_charset to tty_charset. For now, the X11 driver will just transliterate from notice_charset to 8859-1.

(It would be nice if it just displayed wide characters, and there is a patch in the works for that, but given the available free time of the various people working on it, I'm not making any bets. (Work-in-progress patch link copied to #33.)