LangBox International has developed several Internationalization packages for the UNIX operating system. After more than ten years of research and development in the field of multilingual support, LangBox International introduced the support of Arabic, Farsi (Persian), Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, Turkish and Thai languages for UNIX applications.

Initially, the support of these languages implies the management of a double alphabet and a 8-bit codeset different of the common default ISO 8859-1. This issue cannot be directly handled by operating system localization supports such as MNLS or XPG standards that provide support for European languages only, and should be embedded in the UNIX kernel or system libraries.

With the emmergence of UNICODE standard support, this multiple codeset support is not needed anymore on application side. All 8-bits national standards characters have been encoded into a wide 16-bit encoding width. This uniq character set support simplifies the handling of multi-language document or the share of national document to an other national user environment. However, in addition of the unified storage standard, the display (or rendering) of these document under an application might still need some specific processing. This is typicaly the case of the Arabic languages for instance where a "Bi-Directionality" rendering process and a "glyph shaping process" must be done.

The LangBox International multilingual extension support may be divided in two main product families, which are selected according to the UNIX application interface.

TTY (console mode)

LANGBOX: Bilingual supplement to the UNIX TTY device driver for the Character based interfaces. It gives a full transparency use with application such as Oracle, Informix, Sybase, Uniplex... >>See a sample screen session<<

The LANGBOX product provides the language support for UNIX character based application (running on remote terminal displays or on terminal emulator windows). This product is an extension to the TTY driver of the target UNIX Operating System kernel. When loaded and activated onto a standard (Latin-American) release of the Operating System, the LANGBOX transforms the English-only environment into a bilingual or a multilingual environment.

This bilingual/multilingual environment is directly available for standard applications of the system which use "character based" interface (i.e. which can address a regular alphanumeric terminal).

LANGBOX provides :

• Full multialphabet power at the command, file, programming, and application levels.
• Concurrent use of two or more alphabets on a single system.
• Reconfigurable (adaptable) dual keyboard.
• Screen and display management.
• Collating sequences.
• Date and time routines.
• System messages.
• Character sets and standards selection at will.
• Conversion routines from one standard to another.
• Automatic loading of fonts on I/O devices (Alphanumeric terminals, PC and printers)
• Interface facility with the Operating System (special shells).

The LANGBOX's load-and-go transparency allows users to share and use existing applications in their native alphabet with no adjustment

 

GUI (X11 mode)

XLANGBOX: Bilingual supplement to the X Window/OSF Motif libraries for the Graphical based interfaces. When used with dynamic link feature, it adds bilingual capabilities to the existing Motif based applications. >>See a sample screen session<<

XLANGBOX, has been developed in response to the growth of Workstations market. These UNIX stations normally use a graphic console display driven by a Graphic server. On this kind of platform, the most frequent environment is X Window associated with User friendly libraries such as OSF/MOTIF, and the use of the "character interface" and the TTY base application is quite limited on xterm window. These applications are clients that communicate with a Graphic Server through network connection facilities. The main application routines work directly with bitmaps and the concept of character flow has disappeared. A transparent localization is more difficult to implement in the deep server level and the specific language treatment must be included in high level Graphical library. By using the Dynamic linking and shared libraries at the runtime level (if the operating system allows it) the user may use his favorite application in his native language. However, some application concepts must be implemented to allow such correct behavior. For example, static link with interface libraries must be avoided and application fonts could be selected through a Resource file or a command line option.

The XLANGBOX package has been defined to allow localization of pure X Window applications and allows the following features:

• Providing a global bilingual solution.
• Maximum Transparency of applications.
• Total transparency to storage and display of data in national languages.
• Ease of internationalization of applications.
• Conformity with national and international standards.

 

In addition of these two "horizontal" product lines, LangBox International provides comprehensive dedicated applications localized using XLANGBOX. The following products have been designed and developed to address specifically the Arab Countries market. They are the following:

AXMEDIT

AXMEDIT : axmedit is a text editor a Graphical Motif based text editor. Axmedit could be run on any X Window server display. This program has been enhanced for Arabic language using the XLANGBOX-ARA package.

AraZilla

AraZilla: AraZilla is an Arabic version of Mozilla browser supporting Arabic and English HTML document browsing. This product is freely downloadable on this server.

AraMosaic

AraMosaic: AraMosaic is an enhanced X Mosaic Unix/X11 WWW browser supporting Arabic and English HTML document browsing. This product is a derivative work on NCSA Mosaic and is freely downloadable on this server - It is a little bit old, but still working ;-).

AraWebParse

AraWebParse : How to browse Arabic HTML document using a regular Latin browser and OS environment using a server based solution.

The LangBox International Products are following this Part Numbering structure. Please follow it when requesting info or sending purchase orders.