Ok, here's a message guaranteed to get no responses, but I'll try anyway.
I have the need for some Chinese language/charset tools for a project I'm
working on. Fortunately, I have code that others have written or that I
have written that does the job.
But I'd like to make these available to others as modules.
So I'll describe the code I have and ask for potential module names:
- Convert between big5 and gb encodings (in either direction). Pretty
simple.
- Convert between big5 and romanizations of the cantonese or mandarin
pronunciations. This relies on word tables of unknown origin (I think
they may have come from some of the old IFCSS stuff for those who know
about it).
- An HBF font file processor. This code is based on some really old Perl
code by Chun-Chung Chen, who has given me permission to release it under a
'same as Perl license'. HBF is an old format for describing the chinese
characters in a font, based on either big5 or GB encodings. Given this,
its relatively easy to generate a bitmap of one or more characters. Right
now I have code that takes some Big5 text and returns a GD image object
with those characters as a bitmap. This is quite useful if you need to
display Chinese to people without chinese-charset or Unicode fonts.
So here's what I'd like feedback on:
- module names. I was thinking of maybe just sticking these in a suite
called something like "Lingua::ZH::Convert" or maybe just
"Chinese::Convert" or something like that or maybe just a set of modules
under the Lingua::ZH namespace, so we'd have
Lingua::ZH::Convert::{Big5toGB, GBtoBig5, Big5toPinYin, etc},
Lingua::ZH::HBF.
- any idea where those word tables might have come from? There's no
copyright attached.
- ideas for other useful things along these lines.
-dave
