Add comment explaining the encoding change

git-svn-id: svn://svn.lyx.org/lyx/lyx-devel/trunk@15603 a592a061-630c-0410-9148-cb99ea01b6c8

diff --git a/src/output_latex.C b/src/output_latex.C
index d2449d84813e03587a59182fac3a9a8c0804212c..a852b3080594e2ee3a26f1f6fb0eb028eaf09404 100644 (file)
--- a/src/output_latex.C
+++ b/src/output_latex.C
@@ -499,7 +499,34 @@ TeXOnePar(Buffer const & buf,
                // This is of course a hack, but not a bigger one than mixing
                // two encodings in one file.
                // FIXME: Catch iconv conversion errors and display an error
-               // dialog. 
+               // dialog.
+
+               // Here follows an explanation how I (gb) came to the current
+               // solution:
+
+               // codecvt facets are only used by file streams -> OK, maybe
+               // we could use file streams and not generic streams in the
+               // latex() methods? No, that does not  work, we use them at
+               // several places to write to string streams.
+               // Next try: Maybe we could do something else than codecvt
+               // in our streams, and  add a setEncoding() method? That
+               // does not work unless we rebuild the functionality of file
+               // and string streams, since both odocfstream and
+               // odocstringstream inherit from std::basic_ostream<docstring>
+               // and we can  neither add a method to that class nor change
+               // the inheritance of the file and string streams.
+
+               // What might be possible is to encapsulate the real file and
+               // string streams in our own version, and use a homemade
+               // streambuf that would do the encoding conversion and then
+               // forward to the real stream. That would probably work, but
+               // would require far more code and a good understanding of
+               // stream buffers to get it right.
+
+               // Another idea by JMarc is to use a modifier like
+               // os << setencoding("iso-8859-1");
+               // That currently looks like the best idea.
+
                std::vector<char_type> const faked = lyx::eightbit_to_ucs4(&(encoded[0]),
                        encoded.size(), doc_language->encoding()->iconvName());
                std::vector<char_type>::const_iterator const end = faked.end();