Internationalization of MapServer

[dmorissette]

Venkatesh Raghavan wrote:
>
> As a part of the project  sponsored by Information-technology Promotion
> Agency (IPA), Japan, the Mapserver4.0.1-i18n (diff file), grass5.0.3-i18n,
> tcltkgrass-2.7-i18n, nviz2.2-i18n and have been developed. The outcome
> of the Project that concluded in March 2004 are made available thru
> the FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics)
> and GRASS-Japan portal site that was recently launched (April 2004).
> The portal site can be accessed at http://www.foss4g.org/FOSS4G/
> or http://www.grass-japan.org/FOSS4G/
> Links for i18n related source, binaries and installation instructions
> can be accessed form the top-page of the above mentioned portal site.
>
> We hope that the i18n functionality can be included in the Mapserver-4.4
> stable release.
>

[dmorissette]

I also found the following interesting link about internationalization:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/

[dmorissette]

mapserver-4.0.1-encoding.diff - The patch against MapServer 4.0.1

[dmorissette]

mpsnf-i18n-en.html- Documentation of the changes that were made

[dmorissette]

The patch seems straightforward enough and should be easily ported to 4.3. I'll
reassign to Julien to look into it when he has time

Notes:
- A new HAVE_ICONV compile flag should be added, and all the encoding stuff
should be protected inside #ifdef HAVE_ICONV

- The configure.in script already looks for libiconv if GD requires it, but we
should update it to treat libiconv as a regular MapServer dependency, not just
as a GD dependency. An error should also be produced if --with-libiconv is
requested but GD/Freetype were not built with support for it.

- The Windows makefile.vc should also be updated of course.

- The mapfile and mapscript (PHP and SWIG) docs will need to be updated (see
attachment 183). Perhaps we could even add a HOWTO, or at least a page in the
Wiki with the information found in the attachment 183.

[jmckenna@…]

A company in Japan has themselves added international character support to
mapserver 4.0....the company is Orkney (http://www.orkney.co.jp) and they are
willing to incorporate their changes to 4.3.  Their source is available here:
http://www.foss4g.org/FOSS4G/MAPSERVER/mps-i18n-en.html
I am in contact with the president and main developer, and will have them join
this bug discussion.

[dmorissette]

Jeff, FYI I had already attached to this bug a copy of their patch against 4.0.1
and corresponding docs.

[jlacroix]

Starting working on this.

[jlacroix]

I've commited my changes to cvs in 4.3.
I mostly integrate the patch as it is, except for the mapgd.c code that I
modified to include only one function msGetEncodedString().

Note that because of the way the labels are drawn, an invalid encoding string or
an attempt to use the encoding tag without iconv support, will result in no
label drawn at all.

Marking as FIXED.

I have opened a new bug for the documentation (bug 890).

[dmorissette]

Mario, when you have a chance can you please test the latest MapServrer with the
i18n changes on Linux and let us know via this bug if everything seems fine.
Julien will also create a bug about testing on Windows and will include you in
the CC of the bug.

[mbasa@…]

Sample i18n screenshots (.tar.gz archive)

[dmorissette]

Thanks for your reply Mario. We'll look into that. What is the image type of the
attached screenshot, I am unable to open it?

[dmorissette]

(From update of attachment 198)
Julien figured it out: the attachment is a .tar.gz archive.

[jlacroix]

Thanks Mario. I fixed the mapgd.c code to fix what you have narowed in comment
10. The latest mapserver from CVS will contain the fix. Thanks a lot for the
test case also, it will be really useful.

Bug FIXED.

[jmckenna]

For the record, the old documents for this have moved, so I took the time to create a new label encoding howto for this functionality:  http://www.mapserver.org/mapfile/labelencoding.html

-jeff