Internationalization Support Library

The Innodata Isogen Internationalization (I18N) support library provides a set of services that support language- and locale-specific processing of documents, in particular, the management of localized generated (static) text strings and locale-specific index and glossary grouping and sorting.

The library is primarily intended to support XSLT processing but can be usefully integrated with other Java-based or Java-capable tools, such as XML editors, user interfaces, and so forth.

The library is provided as-is via a standard LGPL open-source license. This license allows use of the compiled library in non-open-source applications without restriction. Any use of the source code must be in GPL-licensed (or equivalent) open source applications. Other forms of license, including for-fee supported licenses, may be requested from Innodata Isogen (contact our Sales group).

The I18N library provides the following services:

- Management and access to localized text strings, "static text", in a way that is optimized for use in XML formatting applications. In particular, it provides facilities for binding elements-in context to text before and text after strings, as well as facilities for mapping attribute values to localized strings.

- Management and access to locale-specific Java collators. By default, the I18N library uses the IBM ICU4J suite of collators to do language-specific collation that is appropriate for things like index and glossary sorting. The library can be configured to use other collators. It also provides facilities for using custom collation rules using the normal Java RuleBasedCollator class.

- Management and access to back-of-the-book index configurations. This mechanism makes it easy as it is possible to make configuration of locale- and language-specific back-of-the-book indexes. The package as provided includes a small set of sample index configurations. Users are responsible for defining configurations for additional languages.

- Saxon 6.x XSLT extension library for accessing the I18N facilities from XSLT style sheets. NOTE: At this time only Saxon, of all available Java XSLT engines, provides the necesssary collator extension and customization mechanisms needed in order to use locale-specific collators through XSLT, which is a prerequisite for doing correct index and glossary sorting.

- Utilities of various sorts that are needed or useful when working with localized documents and documents in various Unicode encodings.

NOTE: Support for Saxon 8 and XSLT 2 is under development. Because Saxon 8 and XSLT 2 use a completely different collation management and extension scheme, the existing Saxon 6 integration needs to be largely rewritten to work with Saxon 8.

Getting the Package

The I18N Support Library is provided as a single archive:
- i18n_20050826.zip

Installation And Use

To use the library, unpack it to some convenient place. The JAR file i18n_support.jar contains references to all the libraries on which it depends (provided with the distribution). See the docs/isogen_i18n_user_guide.html for information on how to use the library itself. The package includes a sample XSLT transform that demonstrates the use of the library through Saxon.

Primary Contact
For questions about this library or to report bugs, contact W. Eliot Kimber,