Puzzle with the NLA logo

To value the work of many people who contributed to the NLA paper and other activities in this area, I developed a puzzle which on one side shows the NLA logo and on the other all the elements which are needed to form proper National Language Support in an application.

Size 100 x 75mm

The puzzle is accompanied by a small leaflet:

Puzzled?

You have never seen this special character in an alphabet? You are right - it is a symbol, not a character. It is the symbol of the National Language Architecture Special Technical Working Group (STWG) of SHARE Europe.

What is a National Language Architecture?

A national Language Architecture (NLA) defines the services of an operating system, which are needed to make applications useable by people of different language and culture.

Why did the NLA group choose this symbol?

The character A with its accents represents peculiarities of a number of languages written with the Latin alphabet. You can imagine that the problem of correct support of language and culture become much more complicated, when we go to other scripts (like Arabic) or even ideographic scripts like Chinese.

What are the main elements of an NLA?

The main idea of an NLA is flexibility in every aspect of presentation services. They are listed on the back of the puzzle: Character set / Message handling / numeric punctuation / coding schemes / icons / keyboard support / compare and sort.

Why a puzzle?

You see, implementing an NLA is like solving a puzzle: you need not only the right pieces, you need to connect them correctly! And because this is really a hard work, this puzzle is made of wood from the holly bush. This wood symbolises both durability and fidelity.

The puzzles are hand made in Switzerland by Monte Bois.

For more details see the complete paper on NLA.