# Locale Support

## Document Encoding

By default the latex document produced by `dblatex` is encoded in latin1, that fits well for roman-characters. This said, a real international support involves some kind of Unicode (UTF8) support.

In dblatex, the Unicode support is done by two methods that can be selected by some parameters:

- latex.unicode.use=1 asks for including the unicode package (initially provided by Passivetex) in order to handle many of the unicode characters in a latin1 encoded document.

- latex.encoding=utf8 produces a document encoded in UTF8, that is compiled in UTF8. It requires to have the `ucs` package installed.

In some languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean, the latex document must be in UTF8. Therefore, the UTF8 encoding is forced for these languages whatever the parameter values are.

## Babel Languages

Dblatex should be able to handle most of the languages supported by the babel package. Just set the `lang=lang` attribute in the root document element and dblatex will load the appropriate babel language.

## CJK Languages

Dblatex can handle the CJK languages thanks to the CJK package. The CJK package must be installed to have this support available.

As said in the latex file is encoded in UTF8. Moreover, the Cyberbit fonts are then used.

The install of the CJK package and Cyberbit fonts are well described at: .

### Korean Support

Dblatex does not use the HLatex package to drive Korean documents. It does not use the `hmakeindex` nor the `hbibtex` tool. Currently, Korean is handled like Chinese and Japanese with the CJK package.

## Mixing the languages

Dblatex cannot handle correctly a document containing several elements with different lang values. In particular, if the main document lang is not one of the CJK language, a portion of text written in CJK will not be handled correctly and it can result in a compilation crash.

Even if the langs mixed do not end to a compilation failure, only the main document lang will be taken into account.