The user's viewpoint

Once the message catalogs have been properly installed, any user on the system can use the Oriya version of the Hello World program, provided an Oriya locale is available. First, change your locale with,

  echo $LANG
  export LANG=or_IN

The first statement shows you the current setting of your locale (this is usually en_US, and you will need it to reset the default locale at the end), while the second one sets it to an Oriya locale.

A Unicode-capable terminal emulator is needed to view Oriya output directly. The new versions of both gnome-terminal and konsole (the KDE terminal emulator) are Unicode-aware. I will focus on gnome-terminal as it seems to have better support for internationalization. gnome-terminal needs to be told that the bytes arriving are UTF-8 encoded multibyte sequences. This can be done by (a) choosing Terminal -> Character Coding -> Unicode (UTF-8), or (b) typing ``/bin/echo -n -e ' \033% \G''' in the terminal, or (c) by running /bin/unicode_start. Likewise, you can revert to the default locale by (a) choosing Terminal -> Character Coding -> Current Locale (ISO-8859-1), or (b) ``/bin/echo -n -e ' \033% \@','' or (c) by running /bin/unicode_stop. Now, running the example program (after compiling with gcc as described in Sec. 2) with,

  ./hello

should give you output in Oriya. Please note that conjuncts will most likely be displayed with a ``halant'' as the terminal probably does not render Indian language fonts correctly. Also, as most terminal emulators assume fixed-width fonts, the results are hardly likely to be aesthetically appealing.

An alternative is to save the program output in a file, and view it with yudit which will render the glyphs correctly. Thus,

  ./hello > junk
  yudit junk

Do not forget to reset the locale before resuming usual work in the terminal. Else, your English characters might look funny.

While all this should give the average user some pleasure in being able to see Oriya output from a program without a whole lot of work, it should be kept in mind that we are still far from our desired goal. Hopefully, one day the situation will be such that rather than deriving special pleasure from it, users take it for granted that Oriya should be available and are upset otherwise.