Character maps - GNU recode.

["Jason M. Felice" <jasonf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Someone just submitted to me an alternate transmaps.h which supports ibm840
to iso-8859-2 (Eastern European?) translation - for Polish characters.

However, before putting that in there, I noticed something about GNU recode:

Apparently, version 3.5 of GNU recode (I don't know about prior versions)
installs as a library and contains functions for translating from anything to
anything.  Since we have about 30 IBM maps on one side of the equation, and 
about 10 ISO maps on the other side of the equation (not to mention possible
support for newer xterms which can support UTF8 - and I heard something about
Linux console and UTF8), this means that we'd either need to produce 600
translation map tables (one for each direction), or 80 (one to Unicode for
each map and one from Unicode for each map), or just use librecode.  Guess
which one I'm voting for?

The drawbacks are that most distributions don't have GNU recode installed by
default (I'm assuming, RH6 and RH6.1 don't, neither does RH5.2).
Another drawback is that recode may or may not be portable to Windows, although
my suggestion for Windows is just to provide translation maps like we are 
currently doing, except that Windows can accept Unicode for text display
instead of our currently hard-coded iso-8859-1.

Okay the usual suspects who participated in the iconv() discussion should
participate here, especially if yu know of any shortcomings of the GNU recode
library.

If there is no clean solution, I'll just provide the extra translation map
"pl-iso-8859-2" for the interim.

-Jay
+---
| This is the LINUX5250 Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to LINUX5250@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to LINUX5250-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to LINUX5250-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---