Specifying a Character Set in a JSP or XML File

Implementing Globalization and Bidirectional Support 23-11 This section discusses the following aspects of Unicode in Oracle Reports: ■ Unicode Support ■ Unicode Font Support ■ Enabling Unicode Support

23.5.1 Unicode Support

Oracle Reports Services provides Unicode support. On UNIX platforms, Unicode support has certain limitations; for example: ■ Unicode is not supported in PostScript output format on UNIX. ■ In other bitmap output formats, such as PDF and RTF, you may observe font issues such as character misalignment on UNIX. For information on how to resolve such issues, refer to Section 12.3.2, Fixing Font-Related Issues . If you use Unicode, you are able to display multiple languages, both single-byte languages such as Western European, Eastern European, Bidirectional Middle Eastern, and multibyte Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean CJK in the same application. Use of a single character set that encompasses all languages eliminates the need to have various character sets for various languages. For example, to display a multibyte language such as Japanese, the NLS_LANG environment variable must be set to the following: NLS_LANG=JAPANESE_JAPAN.JA16SJIS To display a single-byte language such as German, NLS_LANG must be set to the following: NLS_LANG=GERMAN_GERMANY.WE8ISO8859P1 The obvious disadvantage of this scheme is that applications can only display characters from one character set at a time. Mixed character set data is not possible. With the Unicode character set, you can set the character set portion of NLS_LANG to UTF8 instead of a specific language character set. This allows characters from different languages and character sets to be displayed simultaneously. For example, to display Japanese and German together on the screen, the character set portion of the NLS_ LANG environment variable must be set to UTF8, along with the appropriate language_territory setting. For example: NLS_LANG=JAPANESE_JAPAN.UTF8 NLS_LANG=GERMAN_GERMANY.UTF8 NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8 Unicode capability gives the application developer and end user the ability to display multilingual text in a report. This includes text from a database containing Unicode characters, multilingual boilerplate text, text in graphical user interface GUI objects, text input from the keyboard, and text from the clipboard. Note: If you develop applications for the Web, then you can use Unicode because of the Unicode support provided by Java through the browser.