Digital libraries are vital for the worldwide sharing of information and knowledge.
However, an applicable multi-lingual computing environment has not been developed for conventional computer systems and the Internet. A multi-lingual browsing environment is an important tool for making information in a digital library accessible worldwide. They have also shown potential problems which must be solved to make the digital library functional. For example, most of the WWW viewers used in Japan can display documents written in Japanese and western European languages, but they cannot display those written in Korean, Chinese, or Thai. There are WWW viewers which can display Chinese and Korean documents in addition to Japanese documents, but they cannot display text strings written in multiple languages at the same time.