[pdf-devel] Re: Proposal of API for the Encoded Text module

[Aleksander Morgado]

>    Find attached my changes to the proposed API for the Encoded Text 
>    module. It's a diff to the gnupdf.texi file.
>
> Please patch gnupdf.texi with the new API. Dont forget to include a
> Changelog entry.

Sure.

>    - Regarding the issue of the `best encoding' to encode a given character 
>    string, I really think that UTF-8 could be the default best encoding for 
>    all of those OS supporting iconv (GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X...) and even 
>    for Windows OSs (AFAIK, UTF-8 is available in all modern Windows 
>    versions... should we give support for older versions?). 
>
> What do you call a "modern windows version"? Could you be more
> specific? 

Well, at least the API to get the default Code Page identifier is 
available since Windows 95. But I must say that I am not sure if UTF-8 
is available in Windows 95/Me/98 (not all the code pages listed as 
possible return values of the API function need to be available in all 
the OS versions). What I've read is that at least in NT/2000, UTF-8 is 
available at system-level (so the same applies for XP/Vista). Moreover, 
Windows Support suggests to use UTF-8 or UTF-16. I will try to determine 
this issue with more detail. Anyway, the function to get the best 
encoding will be able to check which Unicode encoding is available in 
each Windows system, so if it's not UTF-8, it could be UTF-16.

>    This will help not only to determine the specific OS-dependent
>    functions for host encoding support (determine which OS don't
>    handle UTF-8, for example), but also to determine platforms with a
>    lack of some required feature (e.g. 64bit integers, discussed in
>    another thread). I could start a new page in the Wiki with this
>    issue.
>
> There is a little draft on portability in
> http://gnupdf.org/Portability We could summary portability issues in
> that page (availability of iconv, 64-bit integers, etc).

I will create a new section in the wiki for the portability issues, and 
I will add the required dependencies for text encoding.

Regards,

--
Aleksander