icuSources/samples/translit/README.TXT

   1 Copyright (c) 2002-2010, International Business Machines Corporation and others. All Rights Reserved.
   2
   3
   4 IMPORTANT:
   5
   6 This sample was originally intended as an exercise for the ICU Workshop (September 2000).
   7 The code currently provided in the solution file is the answer to the exercises, each step can still be found in the 'answers' subdirectory.
   8
   9
  10
  11   http://www.icu-project.org/docs/workshop_2000/agenda.html
  12
  13   Day 2: September 12th 2000
  14   Pre-requisite:
  15   1. All the hardware and software requirements from Day 1.
  16   2. Attended or fully understand Day 1 material.
  17   3. Read through the ICU user's guide at
  18   http://www.icu-project.org/userguide/.
  19
  20   #Transformation Support
  21   10:45am - 12:00pm
  22   Alan Liu
  23
  24   Topics:
  25   1. What is the Unicode normalization?
  26   2. What kind of case mapping support is available in ICU?
  27   3. What is Transliteration and how do I use a Transliterator on a document?
  28   4. How do I add my own Transliterator?
  29
  30
  31 INSTRUCTIONS
  32 ------------
  33
  34 This exercise was developed and tested on ICU release 1.6.0, Win32,
  35 Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0.  It should work on other ICU releases and
  36 other platforms as well.
  37
  38  MSVC:
  39    Open the file "translit.sln" in Microsoft Visual C++.
  40
  41  Unix:
  42    - Build and install ICU with a prefix, for example '--prefix=/home/srl/ICU'
  43    - Set the variable  ICU_PREFIX=/home/srl/ICU and use GNU make in
  44         this directory.
  45    - You may use 'make check' to invoke this sample.
  46
  47
  48 PROBLEMS
  49 --------
  50
  51 Problem 0:
  52
  53   To start with, the program prints out a series of dates formatted in
  54   Greek.  Set up the program, build it, and run it.
  55
  56 Problem 1: Basic Transliterator (Easy)
  57
  58   The Greek text shows up almost entirely as Unicode escapes.  These
  59   are unreadable on a US machine.  Use an existing system
  60   transliterator to transliterate the Greek text to Latin so it can be
  61   phonetically read on a US machine.  If you don't know the names of
  62   the system transliterators, use Transliterator::getAvailableID() and
  63   Transliterator::countAvailableIDs(), or look directly in the index
  64   table icu/data/translit_index.txt.
  65
  66 Problem 2: RuleBasedTransliterator (Medium)
  67
  68   Some of the text is still unreadable and shows up as Unicode escape
  69   sequences.  Create a RuleBasedTransliterator to change the
  70   unreadable characters to close ASCII equivalents.  For example, the
  71   rule "\u00C0 > A;" will change an 'A' with a grave accent to a plain
  72   'A'.
  73
  74   To save typing, use UnicodeSets to handle ranges of characters.
  75
  76   See the included file "U0080.pdf" for a table of the U+00C0 to U+00FF
  77   Unicode block.
  78
  79 Problem 3: Transliterator subclassing; Normalizer (Difficult)
  80
  81   The rule-based approach is flexible and, in most cases, the best
  82   choice for creating a new transliterator.  Sometimes, however, a
  83   more elegant algorithmic solution is available.  Instead of typing
  84   in a list of rules, you can write C++ code to accomplish the desired
  85   transliteration.
  86
  87   Use a Normalizer to remove accents from characters.  You will need
  88   to convert each character to a sequence of base and combining
  89   characters by applying a canonical denormalization transformation.
  90   Then discard the combining characters (the accents etc.) leaving the
  91   base character.  Wrap this all up in a subclass of the
  92   Transliterator class that overrides the pure virtual
  93   handleTransliterate() method.
  94
  95
  96 ANSWERS
  97 -------
  98
  99 The exercise includes answers.  These are in the "answers" directory,
 100 and are numbered 1, 2, etc.  In some cases new files that the user
 101 needs to create are included in the answers directory.
 102
 103 If you get stuck and you want to move to the next step, copy the
 104 answers file into the main directory in order to proceed.  E.g.,
 105 "main_1.cpp" contains the original "main.cpp" file.  "main_2.cpp"
 106 contains the "main.cpp" file after problem 1.  Etc.
 107
 108
 109 Have fun!