Re: Unicode Support in Java

From: David Goldsmith (david_goldsmith@taligent.com)
Date: Fri Mar 22 1996 - 12:11:54 EST


>We are having trouble with the display of Unicode strings from
>programs written in Java. We were encouraged by the fact that
>characters and strings in Java are Unicode, and expected Java
>programs to be able to display the characters when running on
>Windows NT, which has extensive support for Unicode (for example
>Notepad on Windows NT can display and edit Unicode files).
>
>However, when running Java applets in the applet viewer or in
>Netscape Navigator 2.0, the most significant byte of each Unicode
>value is ignored, and the characters are all displayed as Latin-1.

The Java language handles Unicode characters just fine. However, the Java
language libraries (which display text on the screen, etc.) truncate
everything to ISO 8859-1 right now. Javasoft is aware of this. Both they
and Netscape need to do some work to support Unicode properly. Remember,
Java and Netscape are cross-platform products, so they are trying to find
solutions that work on all platforms, not just NT. It's considerably
harder on platforms with no Unicode support.

David Goldsmith
Senior Scientist
Taligent, Inc.
10355 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233
david_goldsmith@taligent.com



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