Internationalisation

Important notes about running Munipack in a localised environment.

I18n

There is effort to made Munipack locale-friendly; unfortunately, FITS world is, and will be forever, strictly ASCII-oriented and omiting any support of locales.

Never use:

• any local characters, like "čů", in FITS keywords, and
• coma "," as floating-point separator.

You can also consider to avoid spaces, and local characters, in file names. The space character separates words. That means the command

$ munipack fits Horse nebula.fits    # wrong

is passing two arguments, which is not what you are expected. The difficulty can be solved by using apostrophes, or by escapes:

$ munipack fits 'Horse nebula.fits'
$ munipack fits Horse\ nebula.fits

Be also nice to foreigners and colleagues over the world. The non-ASCII characters can be difficult to write and understand in their environments.

Locales

Any locale setting will surprisingly interfere with both FITS and Virtual Observatory pragmatic conventions where non-Ascii characters are forbidden. The limitations is sometimes much worse, in cases, when just only ASCII 32 - 125 (in decimals) characters are allowed (FITS headers).

There are situations when use of locale-specific conventions must be respected:

• Virtual Observatory supports just the dot as the floating-point separator.
• Values in header and table of FITS must use dot as the floating-point separator.
• FITS extended filenames (separation of dimensions by comma)

Typical encountered problems are decimal-point related. Commas can be used both for separation of fractions and separations of numbers each other. To prevent the difficulty, one replaces X,Y to "X Y" (comma is replaced by a space and enclosed to apostrophes or quotes).

In doubts, it is recommended switch-off locales by the setup

$ LC_ALL=C; export LC_ALL

which will leave rest of your system unaffected.