A "point-release" 0.6.6.5 of
Vade-Mecum is out.
It's a bugfixed version of the recent 0.6.6 that introduced partial support for charsets in Plucker documents.
The 0.6.6.5 version includes fixes that finally implemented proper support for that Chinese charsets that appear to be supported by today's handhelds.
These include:
1) Simplified Chinese: GB2312, GBK and GB_2312-80 (that is not really a valid charset for WWW but some pages errorneously state they're composed using this charset when instead they use GBK or GB2312).
2) Traditional Chinese: Big5.
The Russian charsets (Windows-1251, CP866 and KOI8-R) are properly supported beginning from the v0.6.6 itself.
Also Latin-1 and UTF-8 are confirmed to work.
The support for charsets requires much more testing since the developers just are unable to test any possible supported charsets due to lack of support for them on their devices/emulators.
So please try it out and report back!
Also be sure to read this
guide to charsets in Vade-Mecum to get some understanding of how this is implemented and what you should and what you should not to expect from Vade-Mecum in this respect.
NOTE that proper support for that GB-family of charsets requires patching the Python Plucker distiller. The patched file "CharsetMapping.py" made against the v1.8 release of Python distiller is available for download along with the new release of Vade-Mecum. I hope this file wil eventually be included in the Python Plucker distiller distribution.
P.S.
We should thank Wong Yiu Fai for his help because he is who cleared up the situation with Chinese charsets to me.
Thanks!