Citrus Project: True Multilingual Support for BSD Operating Systems

Citrus project aims to implement a complete multilingual programming environment for BSD-based operating systems. The goals include:

• ISO C/SUS V2-compatible multilingual programming environment (locale support),
• multi-script framework, which decouples C API and actual external/internal encoding,
• gettext and POSIX NLS catalog,

All of our source code is, and will be distributed under a BSD-like license. The paper concentrates onto the multi-script framework, which is unique and central to our approach. Most other free software implementations support only Unicode in their multilingual library, or converts external representation into Unicode internal representation and loses significant information on the external representation. We believe a Unicode-only approach is not future-proven, and is not the right way to handle multilingual text. We support multiple different encodings in ISO C/SUS V2 compatible library, and made our library code (as well as user programs) future-proven.