| 1 | This subdirectory contains a general character-set conversion |
| 2 | library, used in Timber, and available for use in other software if |
| 3 | it should happen to be useful. |
| 4 | |
| 5 | I intend to use this same library in other programs at some future |
| 6 | date. (A cut-down version of it is already in use in some ports of |
| 7 | PuTTY.) It is therefore a _strong_ design goal that this library |
| 8 | should remain perfectly general, and not tied to particulars of |
| 9 | Timber. It must not reference any code outside its own subdirectory; |
| 10 | it should not have Timber-specific helper routines added to it |
| 11 | unless they can be documented in a general manner which might make |
| 12 | them useful in other circumstances as well. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | There are some multibyte character encodings which this library does |
| 15 | not currently support. Those that I know of are: |
| 16 | |
| 17 | - Johab. There is no reason why we _shouldn't_ support this, but it |
| 18 | wasn't immediately necessary at the time I did the initial |
| 19 | coding. If anyone needs it, it shouldn't be too hard. The Unicode |
| 20 | mapping table for the encoding is available at |
| 21 | http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/OBSOLETE/EASTASIA/KSC/JOHAB.TXT |
| 22 | |
| 23 | - ISO-2022-JP-1 (RFC 2237), and ISO-2022-JP-2 (RFC 1554). These |
| 24 | should be even easier if required - we already have the ISO 2022 |
| 25 | machinery in place, and support all the underlying character |
| 26 | sets. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | - ISO-2022-CN and ISO-2022-CN-EXT (RFC 1922). These are a little tricky |
| 29 | as they allow use of both GB2312 (simplified Chinese) and CNS 11643 |
| 30 | (traditional Chinese), so we may need some way to specify which to |
| 31 | prefer. |
| 32 | |
| 33 | - The Hong Kong (HKSCS) extension to Big5. Again, mapping tables |
| 34 | are available in the Unihan database. |
| 35 | |
| 36 | - Other Big Five extensions, which I don't have mapping tables for |
| 37 | at all. |