Re: lynx-dev lynx and other character sets

[Klaus Weide]

On Sun, 27 Jun 1999, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> 
> Hi everybody,
> I'm new to the list, so forgive me if I speak weirdly and not in the list 
> way. The time will correct me.
> 
> I have two question:
> 
> 1. What does lynx do about character-sets other than US-ASCII?  Are they
> supported?  I mean things like Cyrillic or Greek.

The best way to find out is to look at the files that come in the test/
directory with the lynx source (they should also be included in any good
binary package IMO).  Play around with the relevant settings in the
'O'ptions screen, and/or the lynx.cfg file or command line options.

> 2. Is there any work on implementing BIDI tags (<BDO> and dir) in HTML4.0?

Not that I know of.

> Do you think this can be done without redesigning the engine?

It *may* be possible to limit most of the necessary changes to one
source file (GridText.c).  Or maybe not, that's just speculation.

> 3. What about Unicode? Is there any program to support it somehow and in
> some way?

Lynx supports Unicode, in a limited way: Not for CJK character sets, no
BIDI, no combining characters.  It can understand UTF-8 as a charset,
and translate it to most of the display character sets (for recognized
characters).  It can also output UTF-8, for terminal emulators that
understand it, but that is less well supported and tested.

There are various programs that can convert text from/to UTF-8.
Someone may have a list, It has come up before.

     ---

Tom, since xterm with the latest patches now supports UTF-8, have you
tested it at all with lynx's 'UNICODE (UTF-8)' display character set?


  Klaus