Recode For Linux

Recode is a program which purpose is to convert files between various character sets and usages. When exact transliterations are not possible, as it is often the case, the program may get rid of the offending characters or fall back on approximations.

Let us coin the term charset to represent, without distinction, a character set "per se" or a particular usage of a character set. This program recognizes or produces around 150 such charsets. Since it can convert each charset to almost any other one, many thousands of different conversions are possible.

This tool pays special attention to superimposition of diacritics for French representation. This orientation is mostly historical, it does not impair the usefulness, generality or extensibility of the program.

Here are a few hints which might help installing `recode' on some systems. Many may be applied by temporary presetting environment variables while calling `./configure'. File `INSTALL' explains this.

+ Compilation time

Some C compilers, like Apollo's, have a real hard time compiling `merged.c'. If this is your case, avoid compiler optimisation. From within the Bourne shell, you may use:

CFLAGS= ./configure

But if you want to give a hard time to your C optimiser on `merged.c', for getting code that runs only a bit faster, just try:

CPPFLAGS=-DINLINE_HARDER ./configure

+ Smallish systems

For 80286 based systems, it has been reported that some compilers generate wrong code while optimising for *small* models. From within the Bourne shell, do:

CFLAGS=-Ml LDFLAGS=-Ml ./configure

to force large memory model. For 80286 Xenix compiler, the last time it was tried a while ago, one ought to use:

CFLAGS='-Ml -F2000' LDFLAGS=-Ml ./configure

Other systems have poor `pipe'/`popen' support or trash heavily when processes fork. In this case, just before doing `make', edit `config.h' and ensure `HAVE_PIPE' is *not* defined.

What's New in 3.7 Beta 2 Development Release:

· The name has been changed from 'Free recode' to 'Recode'. · The libiconv library is no longer included. · A bug wit losing a few characters here and there when recoding big files in the iconv context seems to have been corrected. · Installation now uses Python. · 'make check' accepts a LIMIT= option for limiting tests to one or a few cases. · PO files have been updated from the Translation Project.