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Globalization Step-by-Step

Text Input, Output, and Display




Overview and Description

On the surface, the input, output, and display of data is a simple process-the user enters data with a keyboard (or perhaps with a voice-recognition or handwriting-recognition engine), and the program displays that data using a selected font. This assessment of the process, however, assumes that each user is monolingual. What if a user tries to enter data in several different languages? In this case, the process becomes much more complicated.

Different languages have different keyboard layouts, and the characters of each language might fall into different character sets that require separate fonts. How can Microsoft Windows-based applications juggle multiple keyboards, character sets, and fonts? With all these challenges in mind, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP support standard mechanisms for multilingual data input, output, and display. This section covers the many ways to handle each of these areas.

Paper Size Capitalization, Uppercasing, and Lowercasing
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