If you are thinking about internationalizing your product, in order to produce localized versions for Asia or the rest of the world, your first decision will be about how to represent your data. Will you use Unicode? or local character sets? or both? What laws can influence your decision? And what issues arise when using Unicode? Which encoding should you use? What are the benefits and costs? This uniquely unbiased workshop answers these questions by presenting Unicode's strong and weak points in a clear, incisive manner.

The workshop begins with a short history of character sets leading up to Unicode, from Unicode 1.0 to the current Unicode 4.0. The basic Unicode encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32), as well as other representations (CESU-8, SCSU, BOCU-1) are presented along with their pros and cons. Next, the four normalization forms and their applications are discussed. Unicode implementation issues are presented, notably concerning text manipulation and fonts. The next section is devoted entirely to database issues, from schema design to Unicode migration. The workshop then covers the latest Asian character sets: Korea's KS X 1001 versions, China's GB18030, Hong Kong's SCS and Japan's JIS X 0213 and their implications, both technical and legal (including conformance requirements).

This workshop will show you how to determine your data representation strategy and where Unicode fits in. You will learn what encoding to use, when to normalize, how to deal with fonts and databases and how to conform to the legal requirements in Asia. You will be ready to move, with confidence, to the next step in your internationalization project.

Who will benefit from this workshop and why?

About i18N workshops

At i18N Inc., we are committed to providing a high-quality learning experience. We design all of our workshops based on the following principles:

• visual & intuitive: tables, graphics, animation & video provide extreme clarity
• lots of content: rich, relevant content; our handouts can serve as reference
• abstract models: we consider the forest first, then the trees (then the bugs!)
• no sales pitch: our only sales pitch is the quality of our workshops

"Over the past ten years, LISA has provided numerous workshops on a variety of topics. Pierre has provided the highest quality Internationalization, and Web-Globalization workshops at our conferences and is the best rated workshop instructor we have" -- Michael Anobile, Director, LISA (www.lisa.org).

About Pierre Cadieux

Pierre Cadieux is the technology editor for the LISA newsletter and the president of i18N Inc. (www.i18n.ca), a firm specializing in internationalization training and consulting. He also teaches internationalization at University of Montreal. Pierre has over twenty years experience in the industry; his globalization experience covers embedded systems, shrink-wrap software and Web sites.

Formerly VP Technology at Alis Technologies Inc., he pioneered the transparent handling of Arabic and Hebrew languages and created the core bi-directional technology licensed by Microsoft. At Alis, he designed the internationalization strategy for all products, including the TANGO multilingual Web browser. He has sat on CSA and ISO committees on character sets and multilingual data coding.

As Director of Localization Technology at Bowne Global Solutions, he carried out research and analysis on multilingual Web sites and published the first generic model of Globalization Management Systems.

As a freelance consultant, Pierre is often sought after to consult and to train on these issues as well as traditional software internationalization. He can be reached at pcadieux@i18n.ca.