[GRASS5] iconv in d.text.freetype

[Richard Greenwood]

Glynn Clements wrote:

> Richard Greenwood wrote:
> 
> 
>>What is iconv and what does it do?
> 
> 
> It converts text between different encodings (ISO-8859-*, UTF-8, etc).
> 
> 
>>I ask because I have to #undef 
>>HAVE_ICONV_H in d.text.freetype\main.c in order to compile it on my 
>>version of Cygwin.
> 
> 
> This is a known problem. It should be fixed (at least, enough for
> d.text.freetype to build on Cygwin) in the current CVS version.
> 
> 
>>Am I crippling d.text.freetype?
> 
> 
> Without iconv support, d.text.freetype can only handle text which uses
> the ISO-8859-1 encoding, or a subset of it (i.e. US-ASCII); the
> charset= option will be ignored.
> 
> If you only need to display US-ASCII text, the lack of iconv support
> isn't an issue.
> 
> 
>>Am I simply missing a library?
> 
> 
> No; the handling of the the configure checks is flawed. If you have
> iconv.h, but configure fails to detect the correct library,
> d.text.freetype will be compiled to use iconv, but it won't be linked
> against the appropriate library so the link will fail.
> 
> In the current CVS version, the library checks have been improved such
> that configure should detect recent versions of libiconv (where
> iconv() is actually a macro).
> 
> The underlying problem (that d.text.freetype doesn't check for both
> the header and the library) is still present. There are two
> alternative solutions:
> 
> 1. Make the library check define a config.h macro (e.g. 
> HAVE_ICONV_LIB), and have d.text.freetype check for e.g.
> 
> 	#if defined(HAVE_ICONV_H) && defined(HAVE_ICONV_LIB)
> 
> 2. Make the iconv checks behave like other library checks, i.e. add a
> --with-iconv switch. Without the switch, the checks wouldn't be run so
> HAVE_ICONV_H wouldn't get defined, so d.text.freetype wouldn't try to
> use iconv. With the switch, failure to detect either the header or the
> library would be fatal.
> 

Thanks Glynn. Cygwin does have a libiconv as part of the setup.exe.

-- 
Richard Greenwood
www.greenwoodmap.com