Unicode, as a universal character encoding, is an important medium through which different systems can share information. In recent years, the ability to handle Unicode data during information transfer has become critical, particularly for web applications and those running on high performance servers, such as DIGITAL UNIX Alpha systems. Therefore, application developers have to start thinking about writing Unicode-aware programs.

The concept of internationalization (I18N) support for Unicode may be new to many developers. However, a varying amount of Unicode support is already available in many operating systems today. This paper discusses the features available in the DIGITAL UNIX operating system to help developers write Unicode-aware applications.

Discussion topics include:

o The advantage of providing a single, integrated kit for supporting the major world languages
o Conversion support between Unicode and other coded character sets
o UCS-4 and UTF-8 locales (design and implementation)
o Support for displaying and printing Unicode data
o Problems that arise when processing native UCS-4 or UTF-16 data and possible solutions