There is technology in Windows to work with Indic language text and content; the bulk of this is available through the Regional and Language Options applet on the Control Panel. Through this applet, a user can apply settings that are appropriate for their language and region. These settings are exposed in a number of places within the system.
(Refer to http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/Presentations/unicode21/21-Unicode_WinXP.pdf for more details on how to use Regional and Language Options)
One of the settings in Regional and Language Options ('Standards and Formats') controls date and time formatting. By setting this option to a user's locale, dates, times, currency and number settings throughout the system will be formatted in a culturally expected manner. For example, if a user sets his user locale (language and region combination) to Telugu (via Regional and Language Options), the formatted dates and times throughout the system will reflect the cultural expectations for Telugu.
Figure : The date/time applet once the user's locale is set to Telugu. The month names, the month abbreviations (in the calendar under the month names) and the time are all set to follow Telugu conventions.
The next two figures show other examples of where the system applies the user locale to formatting of dates and times.
Figure : An example of Outlook with the user locale set to Marathi, when a user locale is set in the system.
Figure : The Event Viewer (in Control Panel | Administrative Tools) with dates and times formatted for Punjabi. This is an example of one of the many system applets that exposes internationalized data.
The user's expectations include more than date and time formatting. Each user locale includes the cultural information for number and currency formatting, paper sizes, list separators, measurement systems, as well as other data.
In addition, culturally-correct collation is available for each of the Indic user locales. As in the date and time formatting examples, the system leverages the user locale to determine how lists should sort. Like input, collation deals only with code points. There is functionality in the system that maps between code points and collation elements.
(For more information on the relationship between code points and collation elements in Indic, please see http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn1/.)
The system will give culturally-correct sorting results for a language when the user locale is set to that particular language.
Figure : Windows Explorer with the user locale set to Tamil. By changing this setting to Tamil, the documents are sorted in a linguistically - appropriate order.
The above demonstrates the sorting functionality available on Windows e.g., in file directories or address directories, as well as the built-in support for native file names.