Re: lynx-dev address@hidden: Re: new version of FR.PO][PATCH]

[Doug Kaufman]

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Henry Nelson wrote:

> > > "iso."  Maybe we should make a bug/problem report to iconv-dev?
> > 
> > Yes, please.
> 
> I don't mind doing it.  (Bruno was pleasantly responsive to other needs
> I had.)  Doug, maybe you could brief me on or off list what the problem
> is.  I'm not clear at all how iconv even comes into the picture.  Is it
> only a DOS issue?

I don't think that this is exclusively a DOS issue, but it is most
likely to be apparent on Microsoft operating systems. Microsoft
generally uses its own "codepages" instead of standard character
sets. Thus the Western European character set on DOS is CP850,
which contains the same characters as ISO-8859-1, but arranged in a
different order. For instance the "e acute" is decimal code 130 in
CP850, but code 233 in ISO-8859-1. Lynx has code to convert this for
viewed documents in the chrtrans code, but doesn't convert the strings
brought in by the gettext/libintl code. That conversion is done via
libiconv. The original character set is read from the .po files when
they are converted by msgfmt, and subsequently used by libiconv when
determining the necessary conversions. At least in the dos port of GNU
libiconv version 1.7 (latest is 1.8), the names of the character sets
appear to be case sensitive, and the character set "iso-8859-1" is not
recognized (although "ISO-8859-1" is). I think that this is true for
all platforms that run the standalone libiconv.

Although it would be nice for libiconv to accept the character set in a
case insensitive manner, all the installed implementations are not going
to change soon. I think it would be simpler for the Free Translation
project to have a script which checks for valid character sets in the
translations as they are checked in. For the lynx translations, at
least, we can fix those in the lynx distribution.
                                Doug

-- 
Doug Kaufman
Internet: address@hidden


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