Hewlett-Packard’s scheme for supporting international character sets under Unix has already been adopted by the X/Open group, and at Uniforum in Washington last month, two prominent software houses announced that they would be offering the Hewlett software to OEM customers under licence. London-based The Instruction Set will be selling it as NLS, Native Language System; it will be offering source, doing ports and selling binaries. And Unisoft is offering International Language Support from the third quarter 1987. The Hewlett-Packard software copes with 8-bit characters for supporting European languages, and future versions will support 16-bit characters to handle the more complex Japanese Kanji and other Eastern languages.
