Localization: How to map culture info to a script name or Unicode character range?

Question

I need some information about localization. I am using .net 2.0 with C# 2.0 which takes care of most of the localization related issues. However, I need to manually draw the

Answer 1

Fascinating topic. While it might not answer your question, Omniglot is a good resource.

The correct answer is likely to be complex, and depend on the exact problem you're solving. Assuming your goal showing only letters used in a particular language to separate phonebook sections (as in Outlook), few of the issues are:

• People who have contact names spanning several scripts/languages.
• 2-glyph letters (e.g. 'Lj' in Serbian). It is one phoneme, always treated as a single letter although it has 2 Unicode symbols. 'It would have its own section in the phonebook (separate from 'L').
• Too many glyphs to list (e.g. Chinese)
• Unorthodox ordering (e.g. Thai -- a phone book would be separated by consonants only, ignoring the vowels).
• Uppercase / lowercase distinction (presumably you'd only want one case for languages that support it -- which breaks down in minor ways Turkish 'i').