icuSources/samples/translit/README.TXT

   1 Copyright (c) 2002-2005, International Business Machines Corporation and others. All Rights Reserved.
   2 This is an exercise for the ICU Workshop (September 2000).
   3   http://icu.sourceforge.net/docs/workshop_2000/agenda.html
   4
   5   Day 2: September 12th 2000
   6   Pre-requisite:
   7   1. All the hardware and software requirements from Day 1.
   8   2. Attended or fully understand Day 1 material.
   9   3. Read through the ICU user's guide at
  10   http://icu.sourceforge.net/userguide/.
  11
  12   #Transformation Support
  13   10:45am - 12:00pm
  14   Alan Liu
  15
  16   Topics:
  17   1. What is the Unicode normalization?
  18   2. What kind of case mapping support is available in ICU?
  19   3. What is Transliteration and how do I use a Transliterator on a document?
  20   4. How do I add my own Transliterator?
  21
  22
  23 INSTRUCTIONS
  24 ------------
  25
  26 This exercise was developed and tested on ICU release 1.6.0, Win32,
  27 Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0.  It should work on other ICU releases and
  28 other platforms as well.
  29
  30  MSVC:
  31    Open the file "translit.sln" in Microsoft Visual C++.
  32
  33  Unix:
  34    - Build and install ICU with a prefix, for example '--prefix=/home/srl/ICU'
  35    - Set the variable  ICU_PREFIX=/home/srl/ICU and use GNU make in
  36         this directory.
  37    - You may use 'make check' to invoke this sample.
  38
  39
  40 PROBLEMS
  41 --------
  42
  43 Problem 0:
  44
  45   To start with, the program prints out a series of dates formatted in
  46   Greek.  Set up the program, build it, and run it.
  47
  48 Problem 1: Basic Transliterator (Easy)
  49
  50   The Greek text shows up almost entirely as Unicode escapes.  These
  51   are unreadable on a US machine.  Use an existing system
  52   transliterator to transliterate the Greek text to Latin so it can be
  53   phonetically read on a US machine.  If you don't know the names of
  54   the system transliterators, use Transliterator::getAvailableID() and
  55   Transliterator::countAvailableIDs(), or look directly in the index
  56   table icu/data/translit_index.txt.
  57
  58 Problem 2: RuleBasedTransliterator (Medium)
  59
  60   Some of the text is still unreadable and shows up as Unicode escape
  61   sequences.  Create a RuleBasedTransliterator to change the
  62   unreadable characters to close ASCII equivalents.  For example, the
  63   rule "\u00C0 > A;" will change an 'A' with a grave accent to a plain
  64   'A'.
  65
  66   To save typing, use UnicodeSets to handle ranges of characters.
  67
  68   See the included file "U0080.pdf" for a table of the U+00C0 to U+00FF
  69   Unicode block.
  70
  71 Problem 3: Transliterator subclassing; Normalizer (Difficult)
  72
  73   The rule-based approach is flexible and, in most cases, the best
  74   choice for creating a new transliterator.  Sometimes, however, a
  75   more elegant algorithmic solution is available.  Instead of typing
  76   in a list of rules, you can write C++ code to accomplish the desired
  77   transliteration.
  78
  79   Use a Normalizer to remove accents from characters.  You will need
  80   to convert each character to a sequence of base and combining
  81   characters by applying a canonical denormalization transformation.
  82   Then discard the combining characters (the accents etc.) leaving the
  83   base character.  Wrap this all up in a subclass of the
  84   Transliterator class that overrides the pure virtual
  85   handleTransliterate() method.
  86
  87
  88 ANSWERS
  89 -------
  90
  91 The exercise includes answers.  These are in the "answers" directory,
  92 and are numbered 1, 2, etc.  In some cases new files that the user
  93 needs to create are included in the answers directory.
  94
  95 If you get stuck and you want to move to the next step, copy the
  96 answers file into the main directory in order to proceed.  E.g.,
  97 "main_1.cpp" contains the original "main.cpp" file.  "main_2.cpp"
  98 contains the "main.cpp" file after problem 1.  Etc.
  99
 100
 101 Have fun!