Star Office 6.0 (a.k.a. StarSuite) is a full featured office productivity suite offering applications for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. It provides identical office suite functionality and user experience across all platforms like Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows 9x, NT and 2000. StarSuite 6.0 is based on the open source office productivity suite hosted by OpenOffice.org.

StarOffice has adapted Unicode as underlying character representation to enable multi-lingual features. Inherent to multi-lingual support are issues related to multi-lingual input , output and other office suite related features such as collation, Find/Replace, page layout, and word break iterators.

Typically, language input and output support is tied to a locale and limited by multilingual capability of a platform. While StarOffice leverage this platform specific input/output APIs, it has overcome multilingual limitations on some platforms (like Linux) by enhancing input method support and creative font handling techniques. As a result, user can input/output multilingual text across all platforms in a consistent manner.

StarSuite provides rich locale specific features compatible with any contemporary office suite like MSOffice 2000 such as collation, Find/Replace, page layout, and word break iterators. User can apply any language setting to different sub sections of document enabling multilingual collation or word break behavior in single document. StarOffice i18n framework provides open , generic interface to isolate locale sensitive behavior such as page layout, collation and allows user to pick any number of locale sensitive feature in a single document. The i18n framework allows to plug-in any locale sensitive algorithm (such as word break, page layout) without having to recompile StarOffice and makes it to add new locale functionality easier.

The implementation details behind platform independent multilingual input/output and feature rich i18n framework (which is open sourced) that enables multilingual support across all platforms will be discussed.