[pmwiki-users] i18n and iso-8859-13

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Mar 30 11:12:06 CST 2005


The rest of the answers...

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 05:59:20PM +1000, Algis Kabaila wrote:
> 2. Implementation.
> After downloading the Pm's i18n.tgz and expanding it, I "doctored" the 
> iso-8859-9 implementation, renaming it xlpage-iso-8859-16.php.  The contents 
> of this "doctored" file is as follows: [...]
>   $HTTPHeaders[] = "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-13;";
> [...]
> This enables me to write with Lithuanian diacriticals - and read it with 
> the correct glyphs.
> 
> 3. Questions.
> 3.1 Considering that my knowledge of php is very close to zilch, is the above 
> procedure "safe"?

Yes, quite safe, until/unless you want to have Lithuanian diacriticals
in pagenames.  At that point things may not work properly and we'll need
extra stuff to handle pagename conversions.  And there may not be any
good guarantees about the system being able to handle WikiWord links 
with Lithuanian characters in them.  (See the xlpage-iso-8859-2.php
page for some of the things we have to do to get iso-8859-2 names and
links to work correctly.)

> 3.2 I notice that there are some pages waiting for translation into 
> Lithuanian: PmWikiLt.PmWikiLt, PmWikiLt.XLPage.  If no one else is doing it, 
> I would like to start the translation.  

I already mentioned that the easy way to do this is to edit the 
PmWikiLt.XLPage on pmwiki.org -- however, a very important question at
the outset is whether to use utf-8 or iso-8859-1 (or even windows-1257)
for the character set, as controlled by the 'xlpage-i18n' phrase.
Right now I have it set to use utf-8, because utf-8 is generally a 
reasonable and forward-looking default, but someone more versed with
Lithuanian browser standards would have to tell us the best choice.

For the time being I'm adding xlpage-iso-8859-13.php to the i18n.tgz
distribution, in case it's a better choice than utf-8.  We can then add any 
character-specific handling that may be needed to that file.

I've also looked at supporting windows-1257 encodings in the past, but
since I don't know the languages it's hard for me to know if I'm doing
things correctly or not.  If someone wants to be a tester/evaluator for
that charset then I'll be glad to work on it as well.

Pm



More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list