ICU converters

You can create and maintain custom International Components for Unicode (ICU) converters to use with the OnDemand Client.

To create custom ICU converters:

  1. To create a new custom code page mapping, follow these steps to create a new ICU converter: Download the Windows Binary ICU package from the ICU download page.
  2. Add the bin directory from the extracted ICU Binary package in your PATH environment variable.
  3. Create the custom ICU data directory. From the OnDemand Client locale directory, for example, C:\Program Files(x86)\IBM\OnDemand Clients\V10.5\Locale, create a subdirectory with the same name as the ICU data file (for example, icudt53l).
  4. Download the latest character mapping table (ucm) files from ICU from: http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/data/trunk/charset/data/ucm/
  5. If you need to modify an existing ICU converter that was shipped with the OnDemand Client, and it is not available from ICU, download the afpucm36.zip from the following directory:

    ftp://service.software.ibm.com/software/ondemand/utils/cp2ucm/

    This compressed archive file contains all the character mapping tables used by the AFP Viewer for display of AFP Printer fonts that are not available from ICU.
  6. Select an existing ucm file that closely matches the new converter that you want. This ucm can be used as the starting point to change existing code point values. When modifying an existing ucm, it is recommended that you remove the year specific version number from the filename. For example, if the ucm filename is ibm-2065_p100-2005.ucm, it should be renamed to ibm-2065.ucm. Be sure to also change the <code_set_name> value inside the ucm file for consistency.
  7. If you are creating a new ICU converter, be sure to use one of the CDRA defined private use CCSIDs in the range of 0xE000 to 0xEFFF in hexadecimal, or 57344 to 61439 in decimal.
  8. Run the makeconv ICU command to create the .cnv file. For example, if the new converter name is ibm-57344, the syntax would be makeconv ibm-57344.ucm
  9. Add the ibm-57344.cnv file in the ICU data directory that you created in step 3.
  10. Test the code page mappings by restarting the OnDemand Client and rendering the report.
If you have custom ICU converters and want to migrate them to the OnDemand Client, perform the following steps:
  1. If a modified converter has the year specific version number, like ibm-380_p100-2006.cnv, remove the year specific version number for ICU to recognize this converter. In this case, rename the custom converter to ibm-380.cnv.
  2. The format of the .cnv files can change between ICU versions. It is recommended that you recompile your ucm files using the makeconv utility from the Windows Binary ICU package. If a converter has been renamed in step 1, be sure to change the <code_set_name> value inside the ucm file before running makeconv.