[Digikam-devel] Encoding for IPTC comments

[Caulier Gilles]

Hi Leonid,

In first, thanks for your help. All contributions are very appreciate.

Well, i know the IPTC char encoding problem. Look the bug report :

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132244

.. and the solution is written in this report....

About you patch, you must never use a stable inplementation to build a source 
code patch, but always the current implementation from svn. Look here :

http://www.digikam.org/?q=contrib

With the current implementation, i cannot use your patch directly, because i 
have created a new shared library named libkexiv2 witch is an Exiv2 interface 
for digiKam and kipi-plugins. This way remove all dupplicate code in 
Digikam::DMetadata class and KipiPlugins::Exiv2Iface class.

The libkexiv2 is at the same place than kipi-plugins in svn :

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/libs/libkexiv2

To apply the solution explained into #132244 bug report, the libkexiv2 need to 
be patched. 

Others part of your big patch sound good (widgets, settings, etc.). of course, 
i need to test it indeep (:=)))

Please review again your patch. Thanks in advance for your help

Regards

Gilles Caulier


Le Mardi 6 Février 2007 22:02, Leonid Zeitlin a écrit :
> Hello, Digikam developers,
> I am a active and happy user of Digikam. One feature I like and use is
> ability to save image comments to EXIF and IPTC tags. This way image
> comments entered in Digikam are also usable in other applications I use
> under Windows, e.g. Google Picasa, IrfanView or ACDSee. Unfortunately, I
> face a problem when comments are not in English. I am a Russian speaker and
> naturally want to annotate my pictures in Russian. However, Digikam will
> only save ASCII characters as IPTC comment. It may be in line with IPTC
> standard (although I'm not sure, as far as I can see the standard says that
> caption consists of "graphic characters" where "graphic characters" are
> defined as "characters that have visual representation") - but in any case
> Picasa or ACDSee happily read and write non-ASCII characters in IPTC
> caption. These Windows applications of course use Windows character set,
> CP1251 in my case, which Digikam won't read. In the end, no
> interoperability between Digikam and Windows world in terms of Russian
> image captions.
>
> I understand and share the concern about following the IPTC standard, but
> interoperability with popular image manipulation programs is equally
> important for me, plus I don't really see IPTC insisting on ASCII.
>
> To help my problem I have come up with small patches for Digikam and
> kipi-plugins, which I would like to offer to Digikam community for review
> and comment. This is what they do:
> 1. Add an option in Configure Digikam dialog, Metadata page, "IPTC
> Encoding". By default it is ASCII and Digikam's current behavior is
> preserved.
> 2. If the option is set to a non-ASCII encoding, Digikam will read and
> write IPTC tags in this encoding. Metadataedit KIPI plugin will do the
> same. 3. The setting is stored in kdeglobals (rather than digikamrc), since
> it's used not only by Digikam itself, but also by Digikam kioslaves and any
> applications that would load Metadataedit KIPI plugin.
>
> The patches are made against Digikam 0.9.0 and kipi-plugins 0.1.3 sources.
>
> I welcome any feedback about my patches and hope to see them in Digikam one
> day.
>
> Thanks,
>   Leonid