Chapter 1. Introduction

WorldView Europe, which is part of the WorldView family of national language products, helps you to use IRIX in your language of choice. WorldView allows you to use a variety of European data formats, and it provides full support for IRIX in French and German. (Future releases of WorldView Europe may provide full IRIX support for other European languages as well.)

Different languages and different places have different standard ways of formatting such data as times, dates, and numerical amounts. A database containing such local data formats for a specific language and location is called a locale. If an application program is written in a way that is independent of any locale—that is, if it is written to use any user-specified locale to provide input and output in the appropriate language and format—the program is said to be internationalized. If a database for a locale has been created to allow an internationalized program to use that locale, the program is said to be localized to that locale.

Since WorldView Europe provides localization of IRIX for French and German, all you have to do to use those languages is make the appropriate choice on a graphical control panel, or indicate the desired locale in a file in your home directory. For more details on how to do this, see “Choosing a Locale” in Chapter 2.

WorldView Europe also enables you to:

IRIX 6.2 provides locale databases for the following languages:

Some of these languages have more than one associated locale because they are used in more than one country—a locale specifies both a language and a country.

WorldView also provides fonts for use with all of the above languages, with limited support for Czech, Greek, Polish, Russian, and Turkish.

What is in WorldView Europe?

The WorldView Europe 6.2 package contains:

  • German and French translations for the messages produced by most desktop applications.

  • Locale information needed to run X applications in Russian locale using the Koi-8 character set.

WorldView files are stored in various subdirectories of the /usr/lib directory. For information about installing WorldView, see the pamphlet that came with your WorldView CD or consult the WorldView Europe 6.2 Release Notes.

What This Guide Contains

This guide explains how to set up a computer environment and printer using the locales provided in WorldView. Here are brief descriptions of the chapters of this guide:

  • Chapter 1, “Introduction,” describes the contents of this manual and provides some hints on how to use it effectively.

  • Chapter 2, “Getting Started,” tells you how to switch quickly from using English with IRIX to using French or German. This chapter also presents examples of what you can do with WorldView directly from your keyboard, including setting locales, locating message catalogs, and modifying appdefs.

  • Chapter 3, “Working With Applications,” covers general concerns and specific behaviors of applications, system utilities, and shell-based applications.

Intended Audience

This guide assumes no prior knowledge about how to change languages in IRIX. It does assume that you know what shell you're using and that you know how to do basic IRIX activities, such as logging in and out and using a text editor, such as vi, emacs, or jot. If you don't know those things, see the book IRIX Essentials.

This guide is intended for end-users, but may also be used by system administrators or developers. A system administrator might want to change parts of message catalogs, or simply know how to assist WorldView users. A developer might use this guide to help set up an internationalized development environment.

Further Reading and Advanced Information

The following manuals provide supplementary information and are sometimes referenced in this manual, but most of them are fairly technical, and not necessary for a casual WorldView user to read.

  • IRIX System Programming Guide. For programmers using the IRIX Development Option. See Chapter 10, “Internationalization” and Chapter 11, “Localization.” Silicon Graphics part number 008-1794-020.

  • Nye, Adrian: Xlib Programming Manual for Version 11 of the X Window System, Volume One, third edition (covers Release 4 and Release 5). Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ISBN 1-56592-002-3. See Chapter 10, “Internationalization,” and Chapter 11, “Internationalized Text Input.”

  • OSF/Motif Programmer's Reference, Release 1.2. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. ISBN 0-13-6431151

  • Quercia, Valerie and O'Reilly, Tim: X Windows System User's Guide for X11 Release 5. Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ISBN 1-56592-014-7. For information on application defaults, see Chapter 10, “Setting Resources.”

  • X/Open Company, Ltd.: Internationalization Guide, X/Open. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc. ISBN 1-872630-20-0. Contains information on internationalization issues, locales, message catalogs and other topics.

Typographic Conventions

IRIX manual pages are referred to by name and section number, in this format:

name(sect)

where name is the name of a command, system call, or library routine, and sect is the manual-page section number where the entry resides. For example:

rpc(3R)

refers to the rpc manual page in section 3 of the IRIX manual pages (which is divided up into subsections, such as 3N and 3R). To look at that manual page, enter the command

IRIS% man 3 rpc

In syntax descriptions and examples, you will see these type conventions:

Bold 

is used for chapter, section, and table headings.

Italic 

indicates IRIX filenames, command names, and arguments to be replaced with a value. Also used for options to commands and to indicate a new term used for the first time, as well as for book titles.

Fixed-width 


indicates system output.

Fixed-width Bold 


indicates user input.