Anyone good with character encodings (bug 1921)?

[Steve Lime]

Hi all: I'm trying to address bug 1921 which deals with path following labels and extended character sets. I'm using the encoding code contributed by Orkney. It used libiconv to coverty from one character set to Unicode/UTF8. I've move that conversion to the right place so that it happens before label placement. So positioning relative to a point works now.

That's not the real problem. Character sets for many languages result in multibyte characters and the ANGLE FOLLOW code is assuming 1-byte per character. Anyone know how to determine the number of bytes per character in a string? Is it a constant value (looks like 3-bytes for the Big5-HKSCS data sample I have now) for Unicode post iconv? I'm flying blind here. I think I know where to fix code but just not sure how... 

Steve