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1.1 Getting Started

This manual documents the library programming interface. All functions and data types provided by the library are explained. Included are also examples, and documentation for the command line tool idn that provide a quick interface to the library. The Emacs Lisp bindings for the library is also discussed.

The reader is assumed to possess basic familiarity with internationalization concepts and network programming in C or C++.

This manual can be used in several ways. If read from the beginning to the end, it gives a good introduction into the library and how it can be used in an application. Forward references are included where necessary. Later on, the manual can be used as a reference manual to get just the information needed about any particular interface of the library. Experienced programmers might want to start looking at the examples at the end of the manual (see Examples), and then only read up those parts of the interface which are unclear.