[gs-bugs] [Bug 692381] New: utf8-Ghostscript - Incompatible changes to the GSAPI/GSDLL interfaces

[bugzilla-daemon at ghostscript.com]

http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=692381

           Summary: utf8-Ghostscript - Incompatible changes to the
                    GSAPI/GSDLL interfaces
           Product: Ghostscript
           Version: master
          Platform: PC
        OS/Version: Windows XP
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P4
         Component: General
        AssignedTo: support at artifex.com
        ReportedBy: sags5495 at hotmail.com
         QAContact: gs-bugs at ghostscript.com


The existing utf8 additions for the Windows platform resulted in 
incompatible changes of the GSAPI and GSDLL interfaces. Existing GSAPI 
clients could previously pass ‘command line’ options (= arguments to 
functions like gsapi_init_with_agrs()) that included extended characters 
(input filenames, include path, FONTPATH, etc) as long as these characters 
are part of the installed ANSII codepage. Now this does not work anymore 
unless the GSAPI client is specifically modified to convert ‘command line’ 
arguments to utf8 by itself, an encoding that is not a native one on Windows.

Steps to reproduce -------

- First we need an ‘existing GSPSI client’. A gswin32c.exe from a previous
  release or the current gswin32c.exe compiled with WINDOWS_NO_UNICODE will
  show the problem. We will name this executable ‘gswin32c_ansii.exe’.

- Create a PostScript file containing non-7-bit-ASCII characters in the 
  name but still in the system’s ANSII codepage. Let's say this is "Grün.ps"
  ("ü" is Alt+0252 in the ‘Windows: Western’ ANSII codepage). The contents
  does not really matter, a single ‘showpage’ is enough.

- Attempt to display this file using the ‘existing GSPSI client’ and the 
  new *utf8* DLL:

    gswin32c_ansii.exe Grün.ps

    GPL Ghostscript GIT PRERELEASE 9.04 (2011-03-30)
    Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
    This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
    Error: /undefinedfilename in (Gr\374n.ps)
    ...
    GPL Ghostscript GIT PRERELEASE 9.04: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

  The error happens because the ‘existing GSPSI client’ passes ANSII 
  strings for the argv[] parameter. The filesystem access functions of
  the new DLL take these bytes, consider them an utf8 string, convert to 
  utf16 actually destroying it, and pass the result to Windows.

More on the scope and limits of this bug report -------

Current GS version introduces 2 incompatible changes.

(A) PostScript operators that interact with the host expect any PostScript
    string parameter they take to be utf8-encoded.

(B) ‘Command line arguments’ (switches, input filenames, etc) are expected
    to be utf8-encoded too. (More precisely, any filenames/ paths/ etc 
    inthere must be utf8; the switch letters, PS operator names, various
    names recognized by GS, etc use only 7-bit ASCII characters and their
    codification is identical ASCII <-> ANSII <-> utf8.)

The current report is about eliminating (B) and not about (A). (A) does not 
typically affect PostScript-as-a-page-description-language files, only 
PostScript-as-a-programming-language files plus some uses like concatenation 
of PS files with save-runfile-restore-repeat. The changes help somehow 
with (A) by making gsapi_revision()/gsdll_revision() to report if file 
PS operators expect utf8 or ANSII strings, so the GSAPI client knows what 
to do if generating PS code on the fly.

Next steps -------

Comment #1 below describes what type of changes I consider necessary.
Comment #2 is a list of all GSAPI and GSDLL interface functions/ messages/
and similar, telling which need changing and how, and which remain 
untouched and why.

No patch yet. I hope to have something this weekend. (I hoped the last 
weekend too, but nothing came out for lack of time...) It’s not much code,
but it’s possible the overhead to do this correctly (no platform-specific
code in i*.c files) to be significant. Plus, I don’t know if anyone agrees 
with the design in general.

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