CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

Advice to Developers

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Google Docs is more than a word processor. It provides other functionality as well, such

as the ability to make spreadsheets.

Advice to Developers

First and foremost, and in case this message hasn’t been clear throughout this book, em-

brace Unicode. Much of the progress that has been made in the area of soware interna-

tionalization is directly due to Unicode and the extent to which it is supported in today’s

OSes and applications.

When developing OSes and applications, in addition to supporting Unicode, bear in mind

locale-specic practices and conventions, and to the extent possible, build them into your

soware. Each modern OS has its own rich support for locale conventions. CLDR now

provides a rich and consistent framework for providing and specifying locale informa-

tion, which makes it possible to trigger locale-specic behaviors in a genuinely cross-

platform manner. Deciding between using OS resources and CLDR is not necessarily a

simple task, because each one has its pros and cons. Such a discussion is clearly outside

the scope of this book.

And, as mentioned in Chapter 6 and earlier in this chapter, bear in mind that the fonts

that are bundled or otherwise included in an OS are subject to change over time. In other

words, their names, their glyph complements, and even the fonts themselves, may change

with little or no warning. Instead of referencin ...