Who should attend: Programmers and software designers interested in writing programs that can run in multilingual environments, or who are distributing their software products in an international market.

Tcl and Tk have long had the reputation of making difficult tasks easy. Tcl/Tk 8.1 extended this tradition to internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N). This course will show you how to create applications that can easily be ported from one (human) language to another, including 16-bit languages such as Chinese and Japanese.

Topics include:

• I18N background
• Strategies for software I18N
• Unicode and character sets: what's the big deal?
• Using the Tcl message catalog
• Tk fonts and character sets
• Environment specifics: X11, Win 9x/NT
• Why it's easy to build a pyramid if you're a pharaoh

Mark Harrison has been involved in I18N programming since 1985, when he wrote his first multi-ingual messaging system and ported it to the Japanese 5550PC display system. A Tcl/Tk enthusiast since hearing John Ousterhout speak in 1991, he developed and contributed the message catalog code to Tcl 8.1. He is the editor of Tcl/Tk Tools and coauthor of Effective Tcl/Tk. He is presently Chief Software Architect at AsiaInfo Computer Networks in Beijing, China.