README.TXT
1Copyright (c) 2002-2010, International Business Machines Corporation and others. All Rights Reserved.
2
3
4IMPORTANT:
5
6This sample was originally intended as an exercise for the ICU Workshop (September 2000).
7The 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
31INSTRUCTIONS
32------------
33
34This exercise was developed and tested on ICU release 1.6.0, Win32,
35Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. It should work on other ICU releases and
36other 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
48PROBLEMS
49--------
50
51Problem 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
56Problem 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
66Problem 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
79Problem 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
96ANSWERS
97-------
98
99The exercise includes answers. These are in the "answers" directory,
100and are numbered 1, 2, etc. In some cases new files that the user
101needs to create are included in the answers directory.
102
103If you get stuck and you want to move to the next step, copy the
104answers file into the main directory in order to proceed. E.g.,
105"main_1.cpp" contains the original "main.cpp" file. "main_2.cpp"
106contains the "main.cpp" file after problem 1. Etc.
107
108
109Have fun!
110