              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}, 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, EUC-TW, BIG5, CP950, ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-EXT
    Korean
        EUC-KR, CP949, ISO-2022-KR
    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-4, 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

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.

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.

  - 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-1.1.tar.gz

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


Bruno Haible <haible@clisp.cons.org>