Dr. International
Thoughts on software globalization and internationalization.
Latest posts
Use Unicode!
Recently there were some updates that changed the behavior of a national encoding standard, changing the behavior when mapping to and from Unicode. Those kinds of changes lead to data corruption. I figured I'd take this opportunity to remind folks of the benefits of "using Unicode!" Unicode Benefits Performance Modern operating systems are Unicode, usually UTF-16 or UTF-8 internally. Converting between other codepages, particularly table-based ones, consumes resources and takes time. Even if there's a difference between UTF-8 data and a UTF-16 platform, that conversi...
Using Custom Culture to Set Euro for Croatia
Croatia has adopted the Euro. There are a couple of ways to update Windows to use the Euro symbol or currency for Croatian locales. If Croatian is the current user default locale, then the simplest is to change the desired currency symbol and number formats in the Region control panel (intl.cpl). Note that this only works for applications requesting the current default user locale, and may not be sufficient in all cases. For applications that depend on the Windows locale data, a "Custom Locale" can be created and used on Windows versions 7 and above. The "Custom Locale" support allows for administrators ...
Culture data shouldn’t be considered stable
Realizing that people's preferences change and that those preferences impact data output and consumed by computers. By remembering the context of an operation we can avoid corruption and confusion of our data. Understanding when data is intended for human readability or consumption by another machine avoids problems with data confusion.
Welcome to “Dr. International”
Hi! We've created this space to share some thoughts about software internationalization. Internationalization is a really long word, so we've truncated the URL to just "i18n". There are 18 letters between the "i" and the "n" in "internationalization", so i18n is a bit of a shortcut. (Another common abbreviation in this space is l10n for "localization".) We plan to post around once a month, more or less, and our hope is to cover helpful things that come to mind related to computer globalization, internationalization, and localization. Sometimes these will be more general high level topics. Other times w...