README for Text::Unidecode
                                        Time-stamp: "2001-07-14 02:03:33 MDT"

			   Text::Unidecode

NAME
    Text::Unidecode -- US-ASCII transliterations of Unicode text

SYNOPSIS
      use utf8;
      use Text::Unidecode;
      print unidecode(
        "\x{5317}\x{4EB0}\n"
         # those are the Chinese characters for Beijing
      );
  
      # That prints: Bei Jing 

DESCRIPTION

    It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but
    you can't display it -- usually because you're trying to show it
    to a user via an application that doesn't support Unicode, or
    because the fonts you need aren't accessible. You could represent
    the Unicode characters as "???????" or "\15BA\15A0\1610...", but
    that's nearly useless to the user who actually wants to read what
    the text says.

    What Text::Unidecode provides is a function, `unidecode(...)' that
    takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in US-ASCII
    characters (i.e., the universally displayable characters between
    0x00 and 0x7F). The representation is almost always an attempt at
    *transliteration* -- i.e., conveying, in Roman letters, the
    pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing
    system. (See the example in the synopsis.)


See the POD for more information.


REQUIREMENTS

This module requires Perl 5.6.0 or higher.  (Earlier Perls apparently
lack the "use utf8" pragma that Text::Unidecode needs.)
I have also observed that 5.6.0's Unicode support is shakey; strongly
consider upgrading to 5.6.1 at least.



INSTALLATION

You install Text::Unidecode, as you would install any perl module
library, by running these commands:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

If you want to install a private copy of Text::Unidecode in your home
directory, then you should try to produce the initial Makefile with
something like this command:

  perl Makefile.PL LIB=~/perl

See perldoc perlmodinstall for more information on installing modules.


DOCUMENTATION

POD-format documentation is included in Unidecode.pm.  POD is readable
with the 'perldoc' utility.  See ChangeLog for recent changes.


SUPPORT

Questions, bug reports, useful code bits, and suggestions for
Text::Unidecode should just be sent to me at sburke@cpan.org


AVAILABILITY

The latest version of Text::Unidecode is available from the
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).  Visit
<http://www.perl.com/CPAN/> to find a CPAN site near you.


COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2001, Sean M. Burke <sburke@cpan.org>, all rights reserved.

The programs and documentation in this dist are distributed in the
hope that they will be useful, but without any warranty; without even
the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular
purpose.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.
