[bug-gnu-libiconv] [bug #56304] Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian transliteration

[Bruno Haible]

Update of bug #56304 (project libiconv):

                  Status:                    None => Not a Bug              
             Assigned to:                    None => haible                 
             Open/Closed:                    Open => Closed                 

    _______________________________________________________

Follow-up Comment #1:

Hi Yury,

Transliteration was, in the years 2000-2010, when many people were still using
an 8-bit character set (most often ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-15), the way to
represent text that used characters outside that character set in a lossy
way.

Nowadays, virtually everybody uses Unicode (on Unix, mostly in the UTF-8
encoding). But iconv from UTF-8 to UTF-8 is a no-op.

Therefore, it does not make sense to implement new transliterations in iconv
any more. (Neither in glibc's iconv nor in libiconv.)

The right approach, IMO, is to create a program outside the scope of iconv.

The GNU gettext package has already a filter program for transliterating
Serbian from Cyrillic to Latin script (I'm saying script, not charset). It
would be OK to add Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian transliterations as separate
programs in there.

For how it's done, please look at the files
gettext-tools/src/filter-sr-latin.c and gettext-tools/src/recode-sr-latin.c in
the GNU gettext package.

If there are different transliteration conventions for, say, Russian,
Ukrainian, and Bulgarian, we can have different programs.

If there are different transliteration conventions for Western Armenian than
for Armenian, it would be OK to have a command-line option to indicate the
dialect of Armenian.

Alternatively, you could submit these transliterations to the Recode project
https://github.com/rrthomas/recode . It's a more generic framework for such
things, but you probably need a certain time in order to understand the
mindset of this framework.

    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?56304>

_______________________________________________
  Message sent via Savannah
  https://savannah.gnu.org/