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The m17n Library Documentation

1.0

What is the m17n library?

The m17n library is a multilingual text processing library for the C language.

• It is a free and open source software.

• It is for any GNU/Linux and Unix applications/libraries.

• It realizes multilingualization of many aspects of applications/libraries.

The word "m17n" is an abbreviation of "multilingualization".

The m17n library provides following facilities to handle multilingual text.

• M-text: A data structure for a multilingual text. It is basically a string but with attributes called text property, and is designed to substitute for the C string. It is the most important object of the m17n library.

• Functions for creating and processing M-texts.

• Functions for converting M-texts from/to strings encoded in various existing formats.

• A huge character space, which contains all the Unicode characters and more non-Unicode characters.

• Chartable: A data structure that contains per-character information efficiently.

• Functions for inputting and displaying M-text on a window system.

How to use it?

Simply include <m17n.h> in your program, and link it with the m17n library by -lm17n. See Introduction for the detail.

External libraries and data

The m17n library utilizes these external libraries. They are not mandatory but several functions of the m17n library depend on them.

• m17n-db -- http://www.m17n.org/m17n-lib/download/m17n-db-1.0.tar.gz

  Used by SHELL API and GUI API.

• libxml2 -- http://xmlsoft.org/

  Used by the functions mtext_serialize() and mtext_deserialize(). Those functions return NULL libxml2 is not avairable,

• fribidi -- http://fribidi.sourceforge.net/

  Used for BIDI processing. If it is not avairable, the rendering engine of the m17n library can't handle such scritp as Arabic and Hebrew correctly.

• freetype -- http://www.freetype.org/

  Used for handling TrueType and Type1 fonts.

• libotf -- http://www.m17n.org/libotf/

  Used for handling OpenTypee fonts.

• anthy -- http://anthy.sourceforge.jp/

  Used for the Japanese input method ja-anthy.mim.

• wordcut -- http://thaiwordseg.sourceforge.net/

  Used for finding Thai word boundary in the example program example/linebreak.c.

Contact us:

Global IT Security Group
National Information Technology Research Institute
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

Web: http://www.m17n.org/m17n-lib/

Bug report: m17n-lib-bug@m17n.org

Mailing list (English): m17n-lib@m17n.org

Mailing list (Japanese): m17n-lib-ja@m17n.org

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to:

• Dimitri van Heesch <dimitri@stack.nl>

  Author of Doxygen <http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/>. Without this tool, it would have been impossible to create this documentation.

• Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), Japan

  Writing this documentation was partially funded by Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA) <http://www.ipa.go.jp/about/english/index.html> in fiscal year 2001.

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Copyright (C) 2001 Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA)

Copyright (C) 2001-2004 National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Section, Front-Cover Texts "The m17n library documentation", and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the appendix entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

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