HP-UX 11.0 - 11i Internationalization Features White Paper

Encoding Characters

Support for the GB18030 Standard [11i v1.6]

Chapter 2

Support for the GB18030 Standard [11i v1.6]

GB18030 is officially referred to as “Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2000: Information Technology -

Chinese Ideograms Coded Character Set for Information Interchange - Extension for the Basic Set”. It is a

government mandated conformance requirement for all products sold in China, effective as of

September 1, 2001.

GB18030 is a superset Chinese character set standard, including some 30,000 characters that have been

defined in either the GB2312-80 standard, the GBK specification, or in Unicode's Unihan Extension A.

System level support is provided to allow for the input, storage, retrieval, display and printing of the set of

characters defined in the GB18030 character set standard.

GB18030 support is provided in the HP-UX 11i Version 1.6 release with addition of new locales, iconv

converters and fonts as well as modifications to Xlib, CDE, input methods, printer model files, ldterm, and

the eucset (1) command. The following changes have occurred:

• A new locale, zh_CN.gb18030, is provided to enable support of GB18030.

•New iconv converter tables have been provided to support data conversion between GB18030, Unicode

and UTF-8. The new converter tables available are:

— gb18030 <-> ucs2

— gb18030 <-> utf8

•The eucset(1) command is now enhanced to set the code widths required for GB18030 that are used by

the Streams PTY line discipline module (ldterm) and dtterm.

• X11R6 has been enhanced to support GB18030.

• CDE provides support for the new Chinese locale, zh_CN.gb18030. Users are able to select the new locale

at the time of login. CDE provides localization of all CDE components similar to the zh_CN.hp15CN locale

and the user is able to input, display and print GB18030 characters.

• The Steams PTY line discipline module (ldterm) has been modified to support GB18030. It is activated by

the eucset command and is used by dtterm to process and display GB18030 characters. There is no

direct user interaction with this driver.

• Two new bitmap fonts have been provided to display all of the characters defined in GB18030 in CDE and

the X Window System. The Simplified Chinese input method, XSIM, has been enhanced to generate all

GB18030 characters. The printer model file is also enhanced to print all the GB18030 characters on

PCL5-capable LaserJet printers even if the printer does not contain any simplified Chinese fonts.

Table 2-18 illustrates the two new bitmap fonts that are provided under

/usr/lib/X11/fonts/hp_chinese_s/75dpi as well as in fonts.alias.

Table 2-18 Bitmap Fonts

Filename Fontname

song18u.pcf -hp-song-medium-r-normal--18-180-75-75-c-160-iso10646.2000-cn

song24u.pcf -hp-song-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-c-240-iso10646.2000-cn