              LIBICONV - character set conversion library

This library provides an iconv() implementation, for use on systems which
don't have one, or whose implementation cannot convert from/to Unicode.

It provides support for the encodings:

    European languages
        ASCII, ISO-8859-{1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,13,14,15,16},
        KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU,
        CP{1250,1251,1252,1253,1254,1257}, CP{850,866},
        Mac{Roman,CentralEurope,Iceland,Croatian,Romania},
        Mac{Cyrillic,Ukraine,Greek,Turkish},
        Macintosh
    Semitic languages
        ISO-8859-{6,8}, CP{1255,1256}, CP862, Mac{Hebrew,Arabic}
    Japanese
        EUC-JP, SHIFT-JIS, CP932, ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-JP-2, ISO-2022-JP-1
    Chinese
        EUC-CN, HZ, GBK, GB18030, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950, BIG5HKSCS,
        ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-EXT
    Korean
        EUC-KR, CP949, ISO-2022-KR, JOHAB
    Armenian
        ARMSCII-8
    Georgian
        Georgian-Academy, Georgian-PS
    Thai
        TIS-620, CP874, MacThai
    Laotian
        MuleLao-1, CP1133
    Vietnamese
        VISCII, TCVN, CP1258
    Platform specifics
        HP-ROMAN8, NEXTSTEP
    Full Unicode
        UTF-8
        UCS-2, UCS-2BE, UCS-2LE
        UCS-4, UCS-4BE, UCS-4LE
        UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE
        UTF-7
        JAVA
    Full Unicode, in terms of `uint16_t' or `uint32_t'
        (with machine dependent endianness and alignment)
        UCS-2-INTERNAL, UCS-4-INTERNAL
    Locale dependent, in terms of `char' or `wchar_t'
        (with machine dependent endianness and alignment, and with OS and
        locale dependent semantics)
        char, wchar_t

It can convert from any of these encodings to any other, through Unicode
conversion.

It has also some limited support for transliteration, i.e. when a character
cannot be represented in the target character set, it can be approximated
through one or several similarly looking characters. Transliteration is
activated when "//TRANSLIT" is appended to the target encoding name.

libiconv is for you if your application needs to support multiple character
encodings, but that support lacks from your system.

Installation:

As usual for GNU packages:

    $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
    $ make
    $ make install

This library can be built and installed in two variants:

  - The library mode. This works on all systems, and uses a library
    `libiconv.so' and a header file `<iconv.h>'. (Both are installed
    through "make install".)

    To use it, simply #include <iconv.h> and use the functions.

    To use it in an autoconfiguring package:
    - If you don't use automake, append extras/iconv.m4 to your aclocal.m4
      file.
    - If you do use automake, add extras/iconv.m4 to your m4 macro repository.

  - The libc plug/override mode. This works on GNU/Linux, Solaris and OSF/1
    systems only. It is a way to get good iconv support without having
    glibc-2.1.
    It installs a library `libiconv_plug.so'. This library can be used with
    LD_PRELOAD, to override the iconv* functions present in the C library.

    On GNU/Linux and Solaris:
        $ export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libiconv_plug.so

    On OSF/1:
        $ export _RLD_LIST=/usr/local/lib/libiconv_plug.so:DEFAULT

    A program's source need not be modified, the program need not even be
    recompiled. Just set the LD_PRELOAD environment variable, that's it!


Distribution:
    ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/libiconv-1.5.tar.gz

Homepage:
    http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html


Bruno Haible <haible@clisp.cons.org>
