What level of support should I look for?

Unicode support really divides up into two categories: server-side support and client-side support. The requirements for Unicode support in these two categories can be summarized as follows (although you may only need a subset of these features for your projects):

• Full server-side Unicode support consists of:

  • Storage and manipulation of Unicode strings.

  • Conversion facilities to a full complement of other charsets (8859-x, JIS, EBCDIC, etc.)

  • A full range of formatting/parsing functionality for numbers, currencies, date/time and messages for all locales you need.

  • Message cataloging (resources) for accessing translated text.

  • Unicode-conformant collation, normalization, and text boundary (grapheme, word, line-break) algorithms.

  • Multiple locales/resources available simultaneously in the same application or thread.

  • Charset-independent locales (all Unicode characters usable in any locale).

• Full client-side support consists all the same features as server-side, plus GUI support:

  • Displaying, printing and editing Unicode text.

    • This requires BIDI display if Arabic and Hebrew characters are supported.

    • This requires character shaping if scripts such as Arabic and Indic are supported.

  • Inputting text (e.g. with Japanese input methods)

  • Full incorporation of these facilities into the windowing system and the desktop interface