Re: ISO-8859-1

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 08:48:55AM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> I'm also not sure whether it would be better to recommend using
> @-commands to generate everything.  The upside is that you can generate
> everything with a 7-bit Texinfo source, for maximal portability, etc.
> The downside is that then we absolutely would have to support @ commands
> in node names.

No, we could say that only accenting @-commands are supported in node names.

The real problems are these:
1) Such source wouldn't be readable/usable.  (You would have to incorporate
   some preprocessing into texi2dvi, at the very least.)

2) Word hyphenation wouldn't work.  This would effectively mean that all
   such manuals have to be printed \raggedright.
   (BTW: A few years ago, I used a proprietary system in a big company
   of a nice colour, and that system wasn't able to hyphenate Czech words,
   so everything was ``raggedright.''  But these manuals were not called
   ``books.'')

3) Accented characters created from CM fonts are not at book quality.

> Of course, since ultimately users just want to use 8-bit chars and have
> it do the right thing, I expect resistance is futile.

Absolutely.  Without it, texinfo is not suitable for producing non-English
books.

(And no, I'm not working on it anytime soon, sorry.)

Stepan