Lingua is certainly obvious, but ZH doesn't tell me much. I suggest the straight forward Lingua::Chinese as the namespace with the remaining names the same. Can't say it will make much difference in my own scheme of things, but I wouldn't make it harder to find than it needs to be! Now if you were talking about Tengwar or something useful<g>!
--hsm -----Original Message----- From: Dave Rolsky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2001 12:27 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Chinese language tools 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
