Info i18n (was: Re: Circumflex accent on letter 'i')

[Florian Hatat]

Dans son message du samedi 17 février 2001, Eli Zaretskii écrivait:
> Sounds like a bug in texinfo.tex, to a non-TeXpert such as myself.

Right. Could a /TeXpert/ fix it ? I don't know TeX enough to
understand texinfo.tex

> > I think both @^i and @address@hidden should output î in HTML
> > and a correct (with no dot) "" (Unicode 0xee) with TeX.
> Why would you need @address@hidden if @^i does the right thing?

If @^i always works, that's all right !

> > With info, it's always the same: the output is something like "^i",
> > but it's the same for every other accents.
> This is the intended behavior: makeinfo currently produces 7-bit ASCII
> output, unless the input includes 8-bit characters.

I know, but actually I don't really mind.

> > It could be reported as a bug, since a french text with accents is
> > intended to be displayed on a computer that supports these symbols.
> I'm not sure this assumption is true.

Maybe.

> For example, there are many
> Texinfo documents which mention people whose names include non-ASCII
> characters, but those documents are displayed on machines that don't
> necessarily support those characters.  Worse, the Info file can be
> displayed on a system, such as Windows, which assigns a different
> glyph to the same 8-bit code.
> This problem requires a solution, but it's not trivial.

I think there are two ways to solve this problem:
- make 'info' display 0xEE instead of ^i on systems that support this
glyph (it's not the best solution)
- use a specific, international encoding for every info files.
0xEE will always be 0xEE on every systems, but info will display either
^i on systems which do not support the glyph, or 0xEE where the
glyph is available.

I don't know much about charset/encodings, so I don't know
which one would be the best.

-- 
Florian,
xbill level 21, 22674
http://www.linux-france.org/article/mininet/