Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx translation tables

[Klaus Weide]

On Fri, 11 Apr 1997, Peter Karlsson wrote:

> >>   I just added a Swedish sevenbit code translation table 
> 
> Okay, I have made it available att
> http://www.mds.mdh.se/~dat95pkn/tmp/lynx-2-7-1-swedish-sevenbit.diff
> for anyone who wants it (I'm not that good at how diff and patch works,
> but this should be straightforward to add).

(You should use diff -c format for patches.)

> Now to the other part, is it possible to add character translation for the
> <128 characters?

Sorry, this is not possible.  At least not without rather extensive 
modifications of the code.  Lynx assumes that the character sets it
is dealing with have US-ASCII as a subset.  Sweden (and some other
Scandinavian countries?) seems to be the only region where a different
7-bit character set is still popular _in connection with the Internet_.
You'll likely have problems with a lot of other software too, not
just Lynx.  A better approach IMHO would be to let some specialized
software (for example terminal emulator or telnet client, kermit can
do that) do the necessary translation if possible, rather than build
the knowledge into each program.

You could modify all the hardwired strings in the Lynx source containing
"[]" etc. (look in HTML.c for a start, also GridText.c).  But that
would still leave other problems - for example, how do you deal with
characters from user input?  What about characters that may occur 
in URLs?  (your table uses '@' (\100) for Eacute, I wonder how you
are dealing with e-mail addresses...)

My character translation modifications are part of the Lynx development
code; see <URL:http://sol.slcc.edu/lynx/klaus/merged/all/>, especially the
file README.chartrans.  With the chartrans code, you would specify
a modified display character set in a separate table file, not in
LYCharSets.c (although that also still works).  Although I am using
a more general translation mechanism than the previous Lynx code,
which could deal with characters in the ASCII range, that doesn't
solve your problem.  The translation mechanism is not used for 7-bit
characters, because it would slow things down and not interact well with
other parts of the code (e.g. the wired in "[IMAGE]" strings etc.).

> Please respond by e-mail, since I don't subscribe to the list.

Chack to archives at <URL: http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/html/> for other
responses.

  Klaus

;
; To UNSUBSCRIBE:  Send a mail message to address@hidden
;                  with "unsubscribe lynx-dev" (without the
;                  quotation marks) on a line by itself.
;