This year’s event presents a great opportunity for all attendees to take part in the Unicode Technical Committee Meeting, which will be co-located with IUC 31, running all day on Wednesday, October 17. The Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Unicode Standard, including the Unicode Character Database, as well as Unicode Technical Reports and Unicode Technical Standards.

Lots to Choose From During IUC 31!

The program committee has created an exciting program full of new and cutting-edge topics that is relevant and engaging for the internationalization community. The three-day conference will feature a keynote presentation by Robert Bringhurst, a noted poet, book designer, typographer, historian and linguist. The conference includes a full day of tutorials, followed by two days of presentations, panels and discussions. There will also be technology exhibits and demonstrations.

Tutorials: New Technologies + Latest Methods = Must- Attend Tutorials

Tutorials at the 31st Internationalization & Unicode Conference are designed to provide multiple levels of technical knowledge. These sessions will offer attendees the opportunity to develop a deep understanding of the issues, challenges and technologies related to internationalization, globalization and localization. Presenters will be from organizations such as Apple, ASMUS, Google, IBM, i18N, Microsoft, W3C and Yahoo!.

An Introduction to Writing Systems and Unicode

This tutorial provides a good understanding of the many unique characteristics of non-Latin writing systems, and illustrates the problems involved in implementing such scripts in software products. It does not provide detailed coding advice, but does provide the essential background information needed to understand the fundamental issues related to Unicode deployment, across a wide range of scripts. It is also an excellent orientation for newcomers to the conference, providing the background needed to gain the most from the rest of the program.

The tutorial goes beyond encoding issues to discuss characteristics related to the input of ideographs, combining characters, context-dependent shape variation, text direction, vowel signs, ligatures, punctuation, wrapping and editing, font issues, sorting and indexing, keyboards, and more. The concepts are introduced through the use of examples from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Hindi/Tamil, Russian and Greek. While the tutorial is perfectly accessible to beginners, it has also attracted very good reviews from people at the intermediate and advanced levels, due to the breadth of scripts discussed. No prior knowledge is required.

Internationalization: An Introduction

What is internationalization? What do developers, product managers and quality engineers need to know about it? How does a software development organization incorporate internationalization into the design, implementation, and delivery of an application?

This tutorial provides an introduction to the topics of internationalization, localization and globalization. Attendees will understand the overall concepts and approach necessary to analyze a product for internationalization issues, to develop a design or approach, and to deliver a global-ready solution. The focus is on architectural approaches and general concepts, but it also includes specific examples and exercises. Some of the topics covered include: character encodings and Unicode; processing text in different languages; preparing for the localization/translation of user interfaces; making applications “locale-aware,” including format and display differences; as well as approaches to delivering multilingual and multi-locale software or content.

ICU4C in Action

International Components for Unicode (ICU) is a very popular internationalization software solution. However, similar to any complex product, it involves a learning curve. The goal of this tutorial is to help new users of ICU4C install and use the library.

Topics include: installation, verification of installation, introduction and detailed usage analysis of ICU4C's frameworks (normalization, formatting, calendars, collation, transliteration). The tutorial will walk through code snippets and examples to illustrate the common usage models, followed by demonstration applications and discussion of core features and conventions, advanced techniques and how to obtain further information. It is helpful if participants are familiar with C and C++ programming. After the tutorial, participants should be able to install and use ICU4C to meet their globalization challenges.

Applied ICU4J

ICU4J is an open-source library for internationalization in Java. It is designed to be a 'drop-in' replacement/enhancement for Java APIs, providing more features, more data, and equivalent or better performance. This tutorial will show how to apply a number of ICU4J features, with particular attention given to differences between ICU4J and standard Java functionality.

Unicode 5.0 Tutorial: Fundamental Specifications

The Unicode 5.0 Tutorial systematically presents the details of fundamental specifications that are part of the Unicode Standard. Topics include: organization of the Unicode code space; principles used to allocate and unify characters; encoding forms, including definitions of UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 and when to use each; how to use byte order mark; combining characters and equivalent code sequences; format characters and other special characters and code points; organization of the Unicode Standard. This part of the Unicode tutorial is recommended for anyone interested in a systematic overview of the key aspects of the standard. Detailed technical or programming experience is not required.

Unicode 5.0 Tutorial: Unicode Algorithms

The Unicode Standard and related specifications by the Unicode Consortium specify a number of algorithms. The specification of these algorithms in the Unicode Standard depends on the Unicode Character Properties. This part of the Unicode 5.0 Tutorial surveys the algorithms specified in the Unicode Standard, and extends the discussion of Unicode character properties as they relate to each algorithm. It covers many general aspects of Unicode algorithms: Unicode Algorithm and the difference between an abstract algorithm from an actual implementation; relation between algorithms and Unicode Character Properties; and techniques to access character properties.

Several algorithms are discussed in more detail, for example: Unicode Normalization and the requirements it addresses, including a discussion of the Unicode Normalization forms NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD, their interaction with the Web and what programmers need to know in applying normalization; the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, and its interaction with text layout; text boundary determination and character foldings; and much more. This part of the Unicode 5.0 Tutorial is more detailed and will touch on the description of algorithms and other material that may require some familiarity with technical concepts.

Best Practices in Software Localization

Software localization and internationalization are conceptually separate tasks, but they are best executed with full integration and interlock between the two. This tutorial uses practical examples to demonstrate how localization that is built into the process, starting at the design phase, may help lower costs and improve time-to-market for localized versions.

Topics include: building international support into the product from the beginning; globalization verification testing and how to use pseudo localization effectively; do's and don’ts when creating translatable text; translation file formats; translation file check tools and how they can reduce translation problems, build issues and test duration; translation verification testing; source control and change freezes; terminology management and ‘controlled English’; computer-aided translation tools, such as translation memory (TM) systems; how to build localization project schedules and the interlocks required with development; tips on how to apply the concepts and techniques on projects where the translation process has been started in a non-optimal fashion. Demos will be used to illustrate tools and processes.

Writing Win32 Multilingual Applications Using the Windows Vista MUI Technology

In Windows 2000, Microsoft introduced the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) technology, which enables users to change the display languages for the operating system from a list of available languages. Starting with Windows Vista, this MUI technology and a set of associated APIs are made available to Win32 application developers. This session is intended to introduce the benefits and capabilities of MUI in Windows Vista and to provide the necessary knowledge and best practices to use the MUI technology and its associated APIs to develop multilingual applications for Windows.

The following topics will be covered: the benefits of using MUI technology; an introduction to MUI technology in Windows Vista; how to use MUI technology in application development; how to control the resource content in the Language Neutral and MUI files (resource configuration file); how to use the rc.exe and muirct.exe tools to generate Language Neutral and MUI files; how to take advantage of the UI language settings; best practices for using the APIs, including down-level OS support; and a step-by-step ‘gray-form’ demo of developing a multilingual application using MUI technology.

Making Sense of Oracle Character Sets and Length Semantics

This tutorial covers everything you need to know to work with Oracle character sets. A new model of Oracle character sets is presented that is mapped to C/C++/Java/.NET. The subtleties and pitfalls of Oracle transcoding are explained. Numerous transcoding scenarios are illustrated visually with the model, as are the various parameters controlling SQL literal transcoding and Oracle’s “form-of-use.” Length semantics are introduced, along with their related SQL and PL/SQL functions. The tutorial finishes by discussing the pros and cons of the various ways for implementing Unicode in Oracle.

Web Internationalization - Standards and Best Practices

This tutorial is an introduction to internationalization on the web. The audience will learn about the standards that provide for global interoperability and come away with an understanding of how to work with multilingual data on the web. Character representation and the Unicode-based Reference Processing Model are described in detail. HTML, XHTML, XML (eXtensible Markup Language – for general markup), and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets – for styling information) are given particular emphasis. The tutorial addresses language identification and selection, character encoding models and negotiation, text presentation features, and more. The design and implementation of multilingual web sites and localization considerations are also introduced.

Extending Mac OS X's International Support

Mac OS X ships with extensive international support, but it also has a rich set of plug-in architectures that allow third-parties to supply additional features. This tutorial provides a hands-on discussion of the localization and internationalization architecture of Mac OS X from a developer perspective, and shows how to create new input methods, keyboard layouts, locales, fonts, text services, and other components useful in extending international support under Mac OS X. Detailed examples will be presented. The discussion will be relevant to all versions of Mac OS X, but particular attention will be paid to Mac OS X Leopard.

Program Highlights from the Conference

Keynote Presenter: Robert Bringhurst - noted poet, book designer, typographer, historian and linguist

The following is just a small sample of some of the cutting-edge presentations that will be given at IUC 31. For the full program, please visit the IUC 31 web site.

• Climbing the Tower of Babel with PHP (Andrei Zmievski, Yahoo!)
• When Ajax Meets Globalization (Justin Yin, IBM)
• Unicode Issues in Mars: An XML Representation of PDF (Matthew Hardy, Adobe Systems)
• Internationalization Tag Set 1.0 – A New Standard for Internationalization and Localization of XML (Felix Sasaki, W3C)
• What’s New in CLDR 1.5 (John Emmons, IBM)
• Language Tags: the Next Generation (Addison Phillips, Yahoo! and Mark Davis, Google)
• New Internationalization Features of the Java Platform (Naoto Sato, Sun Microsystems and Craig Cummings, Oracle)

The 31st Internationalization & Unicode Conference is sponsored by Gold Sponsor Adobe, Silver Sponsor PDFlib, Media Sponsor MultiLingual Computing, and Organizational Sponsor LISA.

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The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards. For more information, visit http://www.unicode.org/.

The Object Management Group™ (OMG™) is the Event Producer for the Internationalization & Unicode® Conferences. The OMG is an open membership, not-for-profit consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications, including MDA®, UML®, CORBA®, MOF™, XMI® and CWM™. All OMG specifications are available without charge. For more information, visit http://www.omg.org.