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Writing software that works for people in all countries,
all languages, and all scripts is a challenge.
There are a number of issues that must be addressed.
First, provisions must be made to allow the user to
input text in their native language. This can be
a simple matter of changing the keyboard mapping.
(As it is usually is for European languages) or it
can be a highly complex process involving dictionary
lookups. The latter situation often comes up for
the languages of East Asia, where the user's phonetic
input must be converted into the correct ideograph
from a set of thousands of characters. (These languages
are often known as the CJK languages, for China,
Japan, and Korea.)
Output is another issue that must be dealt with. When displaying
CJK text, the primary difficulty is that
the fonts needed contain a very large set of characters,
so instead of the 8 bits that are sufficient for
displaying Roman text, 16 bits are needed per character
to index the font. When displaying mixed Roman and
CJK text, it is often necessary to use multiple
fonts when displaying a single string. A different
set of problems comes up for the languages of the
Middle East, which are written predominately in
a right-to-left direction instead of a left-to-right
direction. For these languages, it is necessary to
reorder the characters before displaying them on
the screen.
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