Hi there,
Unicode (or even UTF-8) is a great way for companies to centrally manage
cross-platform localisable content. Glad to see it happening, albeit with
some difficulties!
One of the more useful utilities that I've used for codeset conversions is
UNICONV from BasisTech, the new version (although it weighs in at around
8MB) has a tremendous number of encoding standards and may fit your needs.
You can download this for free at http://unicode.basistech.com/demo.html
Another tool, distributed with the full source code, is RECODE. This tool
has support for a bizarre number of character encodings - very useful
indeed. You can get this tool from
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/recode/recode-3.5.tar.gz.
If your files are text-based, then you should ensure the your End of Line
(EOL) characer sequence(s) are specified correctly, i.e.,
for PC DOS/Windows/NT, EOL=CRLF
for UNIX, EOL=LF
for Macintosh, EOL=CR
Again, if your files are text-based you can typically validate the
conversions (something I would strongly recommend) using a Web Browser
(assuming of course you have a capable enough browser, the required NLS
support and a supporting font). I've found that IE 4.0 with the various
language packs does a good job.
Best of luck
Cheers
Steve.
-----Original Message-----
From: Deborah Goldsmith [mailto:goldsmith@apple.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 1999 9:57 PM
To: Unicode List
Subject: Re: Translation from PC to Macintosh/Unix
> We are a translation company in France and we need to translate Eastern
> Europe documents written in Unicode on PCs into Macintosh and UNIX
> character sets.
>
> The conversion through Word does not work and both Microsoft and Apple
> cannot find a solution to the problem.
>
> Special characters do not correspond in the two Unicode tables and we have
> squares instead of regular characters.
>
> Can you save us with a solution?
>
> Thanks a lot and best regards.
First of all, you will need the appropriate script system installed on your
Mac for the particular Eastern European characters you want to handle. If
you are not sure about that, please post the details.
Second, get the freeware Mac application "Cyclone". It uses the Text
Encoding Converter built into the Mac OS to convert among a large number of
character sets, including Unicode. It only deals with plain text files,
though.
You can download Cyclone from:
http://www.ire.pw.edu.pl/~tkukiel/cyclone.html
I hope this helps...
Deborah Goldsmith
Manager, International Toolbox Group
Apple Computer, Inc.
goldsmith@apple.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:54 EDT