A variant of w3m with support for multiple character encodings

This document describes about a variant of w3m with support for the following character encodings

• ISO 2022
• UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE
• Shift_JIS
• Big Five
• EUC-tw
• GBK, GB 18030-2000 (a.k.a. GBK2K)
• Johab
• Unified Hangul
• KOI8-R
• KOI8-U
• Microsoft Windows Codepages 1250 -- 1258

..., and it further includes the following enhancement, though they are not related with character encoding.

• You can add or change programs to process encodings of local files or of body of HTTP response at run time.
• You can specify file name extensions representing language such as ".en" or ".ja".
• You can change key bindings in built-in one-line editor by specifying functions with names starting with "E:" in your keymap file.
• You can change key bindings to handle menus by specifying functions with names starting with "M:" in your keymap file.
• You can load documents concurrently with separate processes, via "keep alive" connection in HTTP/1.1.
• In formatted output, you can number anchors and/or links to images and include list of all of them in the output.
• Any HTTP request header to be added can be specified at run-time.
• String expansion in mailcap entry is somewhat enhanced.
• Support for "browsecap".
• Support for (almost) real frame (i.e. tiling window system).
• Enhancement of completion in built-in one-line editor (anyway type TAB).

Current status

The page which includes both UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters and ISO 2022 registered characters, is rendered without any problem, and can be viewed on kterm with ISO 2022, or on xterm with UTF-8. In case terminal emulator fails to find corresponding fonts, garbages may appear on screen, but they will disappear if missing fonts are supplied.

It is not tested at all whether line input routine can handle double width characters other than JIS X 0208. Right-to-left writing language is not considered at all. Terminal emulators used for test are kterm(-6.2.0), xterm(-165) with utf-8 support, and rxvt(-2.6.3) with euc-jp support.

Installation

If you will use character encoding extension part of this variant, you need first to get and install the support library. In most POSIX conforming environment, you just need to issue the following commands:

make install ; ldconfig

You may further need to install Boehm-GC library, unless you have already the library. Notice that you may need to install include file gc.h, and probably private/gc_private.h, in hand.

Then move to the directory where you extracted the tarball

w3mmee-p24-23.tar.gz (681KB, 2006-09-30 07:38:28)

configure ; make ; su -c 'make install'

Which language do you prefer?

When you invoke the installed executable, you need to assign the environment variable "W3MLANG" with the value

<your language code>_<your country code>.kterm

in case you are using kterm,

<your language code>_<your country code>.UTF-8

in case you are using xterm.

<your language code>_<your country code>.eucJISX0208

in case you are using rxvt with EUC-jp support.

<your language code>_<your country code>.sjis

in case you are using rxvt with Shift_JIS support.

<your language code>_<your country code>.big5

in case you are using rxvt with Big Five support.

Here is a detailed description about run-time configuration.

You can view ChangeLog:

w3mmee-release-ChangeLog.txt (201KB, 2006-09-30 07:38:28)

which is included the above tarball.

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Known problems

Here is the list of known problems in the latest release. They should be fixed in the latest snapshot of release branch in my CVS repository. Please consult ChangeLog of the snapshot for implementation details.

Different from the case of the release version, to make the latest snapshot, libmoe is mandatory.

• User functions ``PREV'' and ``NEXT'' behave reversely.

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Any questions or comments about this page are greatly appreciated.

Almost all contents in this site are written by Kiyokazu SUTO (i.e. me) unless especially noted. I want to put all of them into the PUBLIC DOMAIN, even though some lawyers mention that it is impossible in my country.