Codesets

Introduction
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Classic Amiga systems, but even modern AmigaOS versions like AmigaOS4 and
MorphOS don't come with a centralized programming interface for dealing
with different codesets. Especially for the more and more important dealing
with the UTF-8 codeset (e.g. in internet communication programs like YAM or
SimpleMail) a centralized way or API is definitly required and provides
signification advantages. In addition, it should serve as a single interface
point for developers wanting to develop multi-platform applications without
having to implement charset conversion routines on each OS differently.

codesets.library should solve this by providing 3rd party developers an
efficient and easy to use API for dealing with different codesets like
ISO-8859-15, Amiga-1251 but also the mentioned UTF-8 standard, etc. It is
already widly used in known programs like YAM (Internet Mailer) for
example and therefore considered very stable.

The currently internally supported (hardcoded) charsets/codesets are:
(conversions are possible from and to each codeset)

AmigaPL           - Polish (Amiga)
Amiga-1251        - Cyrillic (Amiga)
ISO-8859-1        - West European
ISO-8859-1 + Euro - West European (with EURO)
ISO-8859-2        - Central/East European
ISO-8859-3        - South European
ISO-8859-4        - North European
ISO-8859-5        - Slavic languages
ISO-8859-9        - Turkish
ISO-8859-15       - West European II
ISO-8859-16       - South-Eastern European
KOI8-R            - Russian
UTF-8             - Unicode

In addition, external charset table files can be stored in LIBS:Charsets
or loaded by an application from PROGDIR:Charsets. The charset files included
with this distributions are:

IBM866        - Cyrillic (cp866)
ISO-8859-7    - Greek (LatinGreek)
ISO-8859-10   - Nordic (Latin 6)
windows-1250  - Central/East Europe (Windows)
windows-1251  - Cyrillic (Windows)
windows-1252  - West European (Windows)

More additional, but rarly used charset tables can be found at:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/

NOTE: Please note that on operating systems having own codeset/charset
querying support (e.g. AmigaOS4), codesets.library tries to use the system's
functionality as much as possible and will load all additional codesets
supported by the OS itself. Therefore, the above list is just meant to list
the very bare minimum of supported codesets. Please check with your
operating system manual before manually installing additional charset
tables as they might already be available in your OS. In case an internal
charset conflicts with an external charset file, the internal charset is
preferred.

The library is available for AmigaOS3 (m68k), AmigaOS4 (PPC), MorphOS (PPC)
or for AROS.

It is an open-source development effort of many people and is
kindly hosted on Github. The project name is "libcodesets" and the
project's page can be found at:

https://github.com/jens-maus/libcodesets

Please use this address for further updates, bug reports and feature
requests and try to avoid direct mail contact to single developers. We really
prefer to get bug reports via the sourceforge.net platform if possible.

Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~
1) Extract the archive to a temporary directory.

   > cd RAM:
   > lha x codesets.lha

2) Go to the "codesetsLibrary/Libs/<OS>" directory where <OS> is the directory
   matching the operating system you want to install the library for.

   > cd codesets/Libs/AmigaOS4

3) copy the library out of the <OS> directory to your LIBS: directory.

   > copy codesets.library LIBS:

4) In case you are running an operating system from which codesets.library
   can't directly obtain additional charsets/codesets, you have to copy
   additional charset files to the LIBS:Charsets directory. (This is only
   required for AmigaOS3 and MorphOS):

   > cd RAM:codesets
   > copy ALL Charsets LIBS:

5) reboot and enjoy ;)

History
~~~~~~~
Since version 6.0, codesets.library development is publically hosted and
maintained by an open-source developer community. Many major changes have
been made during the first open-source release cycle of 6.0. Therefore,
include files and some internal functions have been changed a lot. If you
were already using version 5.x in your applications you are supposed to
update them according to the new 6.x library interface. However, the library
was tried to be still somehwat compatible to the old 5.x API.

For a detailed change log since the last release please consult the
included "ChangeLog" file in the distribution archive.

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