Multibyte character support in text formatting

Certain text formatting commands can be used to process text for multibyte languages.

These commands are identified with an asterisk (*) in the list under International character support in text formatting. Text formatting commands not in the list have not been enabled to process international characters.

If supported by your input device, multibyte characters can be entered directly. Otherwise, you can enter any multibyte character in the ASCII form \[N], where N is the 2-, 4-, 6-, 7-, or 8-digit hexadecimal encoding for the character.

Although the names of the requests, macros, and commands are based on English, most of them can accept input (such as file names and parameters) containing any type of multibyte character.

If you are already familiar with using text-formatting commands with single-byte text, the following list summarizes characteristics that are noteworthy or unique to the multibyte locales:

• Text is not hyphenated.
• Special format types are required for multibyte numerical output. Japanese format types are available.
• Text is output in horizontal lines, filled from left to right.
• Character spacing is constant, so characters automatically align in columns.
• Characters that are not defined for the interface to a specific output device produce no output or error indication.