Re: MSWrite plugin default codepage issue

From: "Ingo Brückl" <ib@wupperonline.de>
Subject: Re: MSWrite plugin default codepage issue

>
>> Also, why is the parameter 'mswrite-codepage' and not 'encoding' like in
>> other similar plugins?
>
> The importer arguments apparently get passed to all importers (at least that
> is what I understand from looking at the sources), thus it seems to be a good
> idea to distinguish what plugin is meant.
>

It would be nice to give it more generic name, so several plugins which work with other formats with legacy codepages could reuse it, to reduce confusion.

>> Why the most common case when documents are in user's local codepage is not
>> fixed?
>
> Do you use AbiWord under Windows? If so, can you imagine that others use
> AbiWord under different operating systems with different "local codepages"?
>
> There is no such thing as a "local codepage" fitting the codepage an
> arbitrary Write document may have been written in.
>

AbiWord API has a method of obtaining desired 8-bit codepage on each system. The inability of users of marginal OS's with ~1% popularity to set it correctly definitely is not a reason to negatively affect users of other OS's, which can be easily set up accordingly to user-preferred language setting, including codepage for legacy documents.

The case whether documents being imported contain custom fonts with character set different from current user settings is so marginal that it can be merged with previous case of marginal OS's. In that case, users are welcome to use importer parameters to set it explicitly.
The other users should not be forced to use that confusing way, and _should be able to have their documents imported correctly by default_.

Also, if you're serious about locale issues, you should consider implementing an importer parameter(s) for specifying encoding for each typeface name individually.

>> Importer parameters can be specified only in batch conversions, not when
>> opening a document in a standard way.
>
> Hmmm, then I'm doing something wrong, because this patch works just fine as a
> command line argument to AbiWord, translating all Write documents into the
> given codepage when opening.
>

Because you're setting importer properties from global variable, parsed from arguments, instead of using preset properties from IE_Imp. It's a hack.
Received on Mon Aug 1 18:25:30 2011