Re: Unicode/UTF-8 support for man

[qrczak@xxxxxxxxxx (Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk)]

Tue, 15 Aug 2000 17:22:24 +0200 (CEST), Bruno Haible <haible@xxxxxxx> pisze:

> No. The portable alternative is "iconv". (iconv is portable, because
> if it is not contained in the C library, the libiconv substitute can
> be used.)

libiconv is large (6MB), especially as I need only a little
functionality from it.

I need that on Windows too. Does mbrtowc work on Windows? Does iconv work?
mbrtowc is ISO/ANSI C, iconv is Unix98 - not even Posix.

> See the sh-utils-2.0j or fileutils-4.0x snapshot on alpha.gnu.org,
> files
>          m4/codeset.m4
>          m4/glibc21.m4
>          m4/iconv.m4
>          lib/Makefile.am
>          lib/unicodeio.h
>          lib/unicodeio.c
>          lib/localcharset.c
>          lib/config.charset

It needs much of configure work, compared to mbrtowc which needs
none when it works. The method of determining the iconv name of
the default locale looks ugly and non-portably. Reads locale.alias
itself, contains its own database of OSes and charsets.

Looks extermely fragile.

It must be very fast, because it will be the default in all I/O.
Going through UTF-8 looks like an unnecessary overhead.

-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak@xxxxxxxxxx http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
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QRCZAK

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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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