The m17n Library Documentation

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-texts 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 many functions of the m17n library depend on them.

• m17n-db – http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/m17n/m17n-db-1.8.4.tar.gz

  Provide various information to the m17n library.

• libxml2 – http://xmlsoft.org/

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

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

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

• freetype – http://www.freetype.org/

  Used for handling local fonts.

• fontconfig – http://www.fontconfig.org/

  Used for handling local fonts supported by the freetype library.

• fontconfig – http://freedesktop.org/Software/fontconfig

  Used for finding local fonts in combination with Xft.

• xft – http://freedesktop.org/Software/Xft

  Used for drawing text with local fonts by X Render Extension of X server in combination with fontconfig.

• GD

  Used for rendering text with local fonts on bitmap/pixmap.

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

  Used for handling OpenType fonts in combination with freetype and Xft.

• 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:

Web: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/m17n/

Bug report: https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=m17n

Mailing lists: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/m17n-list

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to:

• Dimitri van Heesch doxyg.nosp@m.en@g.nosp@m.mail..nosp@m.com

  Author of Doxygen https://www.doxygen.nl/. 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) https://www.ipa.go.jp/en/index.html in fiscal year 2001.

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

Copyright (C) 2001-2011 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, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the appendix entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".