WorldView

WorldView Language Product Family

The WorldViewTM Products merge international character sets and local conventions into the user environment for SGI® workstations. Users can tailor the desktop to reflect a number of supported languages. Developers can design applications to support multiple localized versions.

SGI recognizes that it is essential to provide native language support for its international customers. Documents can be created, edited, and printed in the native language, and many of the user interfaces are localized as well. These include key user interface and system messages. Not only is text localized, but formatting of lists, text, and data -- such as date, time, number, and currency -- follows native conventions for each country.

SGI currently has fully localized desktops for the following native language support products:

  • WorldView French
  • WorldView German
  • WorldView Japanese
  • WorldView Korean
  • WorldView Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)
WorldView Czech Support and WorldView Cyrillic Support are available to supplement locale support for the Czech and Russion-KOI locales.

WorldView Japanese supports Japanese input via Romaji and kana-kanji conversion. WorldView Chinese supports both the simplified and the traditional forms.

Supported Capabilities

All of the fully localized WorldView products support a core set of capabilities for day-to-day tasks:

  • Date, time of day, currency, calendar and numeric formats, and collation sequences follow the culturally accepted norms for the selected locale
  • Documents can be created, edited, and printed in the native language
  • Electronic mail can be sent and received in the supported language
  • Localized applications are supported
For all fully localized WorldView products, the IRIX® user environment, printing, and many of the bundled applications are localized.

Localization Model

The IRIX operating environment, with the ability to handle multibyte character sets and local conventions, easily takes advantage of the locale-specific information provided in WorldView. It supports over 30 different locales (Table 1). Four additional locales are supported in the Asian language products. Additionally, it includes the International Codeset Conversion Library, iconv, an XPG4 API that converts characters from one codeset to another.

For IRIX 6.3 and 6.4, major enhancements have been added to ipanel. Now a user can select country, natural language, keyboard layout, and time zone setting through the ipanel graphical user interface. If the specified combination of the locale does not exist in the system, ipanel will generate the appropriate locale files. For example: a user residing in the United States who likes to use Spanish as the natural language, Spanish Keyboard, and U.S./Pacific time zone can setup this configuration all under ipanel.

The modular design and compliance with the popular internationalization standards make WorldView an attractive platform for application developers. All culture- and language-specific aspects of the application’s user interface can be determined using a library of calls for selecting the native language environment and accessing local behavior parameters.