[sword-devel] ICU transliteration resources

[Chris Little]

Matthew Talbert wrote:
> I have successfully compiled ICU with mingw on Windows and I'm trying
> to get the transliteration filters working. These now work in Xiphos
> in linux. However, the location of the filters appears hard-coded in
> utf8transliterator.cpp. Is there an interface to allow passing the
> location at runtime? This is necessary for Windows where the location
> is not known at compile time.

None of the hard-coded paths are used in BibleCS. BibleCS finds its 
resources in the current directory (or using PATH if that fails) in the 
standard way that one locates DLLs. For details about why those 
hardcoded paths are in there, I believe you would have to ask Daniel 
Glassey.

I believe there is also a way to pass locations of resource bundles at 
runtime, but I'm not sure what it is.

> Additionally, I hardcoded the location into utf8transliterator.cpp,
> and it apparently loaded the filters, but transliteration still wasn't
> working in Xiphos. Is there some way to test that the resource files
> are actually correct?

If you build ICU from source, it should result in a program called 
uconv. If you run "uconv -L", it will list all of the transliterator 
resources available in whichever resource bundle(s) it is finding.

> I do not understand how BibleCS is managing this, as I was unable to
> even locate the resources in the installation.

ICU resources are located in the file icudt40.dll ("40" being for 
version 4.0 and being adjusted accordingly for other releases of ICU). 
It's located in the program's directory, which is the same way Adobe 
Acrobat, Logos, etc. package their ICU DLL.

Building & linking the ICU DLL is a bit complicated. Visual Studio is 
one of ICU's reference platforms, but Borland C++ Builder isn't even a 
supported platform. So we build the resource bundle lib & dll in VS, 
convert the lib from VS to Borland format, link against the converted 
lib, and ship the VS dll. So if it's possible to use/convert the VS lib 
and use the same dll as BibleCS, that might be the best solution for 
you. (I can send the lib file if you'd like to try.)

--Chris