Unicode in Your Pocket: How the Symbian Platform Implements Unicode for Wireless Information Devices
Intended Audience: |
Software Engineer, Systems Analyst |
Session Level: |
Intermediate |
This paper outlines Symbian's support for Unicode. The Symbian platform,
known formerly as EPOC, is a powerful multitasking operating system
intended for wireless information devices ranging from palmtop computers,
through communicator devices marrying telephony and personal information
management, to smartphones. The system has run on Unicode only since 1999,
and has tracked all the changes in the Unicode standard. An earlier paper
delivered at the IUC16 in Amsterdam in March 2000 discussed how design
issues were solved in storing Unicode character properties, implementing
the standard Unicode collation and compression systems at the base level of
the operating system, and adding support for complex scripts. This paper
draws on a further year of experience and reports on the lessons that have
been learnt over that period, during which the first mobile phone to use
the Symbian platform, the Ericsson R380, has been released. Issues
discussed in more detail include complex script support for low-level text
drawing, conversion between legacy encodings and Unicode, locales and
locale-dependent collation, and input method editors for Chinese and
Japanese. The paper concludes by claiming that Symbian supports Unicode in
most important respects, while admitting that there is still work to be
done, for example in support for surrogates. However, developers can work
with the Symbian platform in the full confidence that Unicode features work
in the way described in The Unicode Standard Version 3.0.
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