Re: texinfo and UTF-8

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Sergey Poznyakoff" <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 11:06:01 +0300
> Cc: <address@hidden>, <address@hidden>
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> ha escrit:
> 
> > But you already know the @encoding that was used to produce the
> > document, so why do you request that LC_ALL be set?
> 
> Technically speaking, it's not me who's requesting it, it's mbrtowc
> and its keen who do :) Well, to be strict enough, they require LC_CTYPE 
> to be set.

You can call `setenv' internally.  That should satisfy `mbrtowc',
right?

> > That depends on the editor.  For example, with Emacs, this can be done
> > even in the text-mode ("emacs -nw") session, assuming, of course, that
> > the document does not use any character outside the ISO-8859-2
> > repertoire (if it does, the foreign characters will be displayed as
> > `?').
> 
> Yes, but this assumption is very limiting.

What else can you assume about a text terminal except that it supports
a single charset?

> (As a side note, I was not
> able to edit Polish documentation files written in UTF-8 using Emacs
> 22.1.1 and a terminal set to ISO-8859-2 - every Polish letter was
> represented as `?' even though the terminal charset is able to render
> it. But maybe I did something wrong...)

Try setting terminal-coding-system to ISO-8859-2 (C-x RET t).

> > > In my opinion, it is user's responsibility to ensure his terminal is
> > > set appropriately.
> > 
> > I don't mind requiring the user to set up her terminal, but
> > unfortunately, this is not all she needs to do.  The user will also
> > need to install a version of terminal (fonts, etc.) that fit whatever
> > @encoding was used in the document.  And that is not as easy as
> > setting LC_ALL.
> 
> Sure, that's more difficult. But on the other hand, it will be
> impossible to view the document without these fonts anyway. I mean,
> if, for example, you are going to read a Japanese info file, you have to
> have the necessary fonts, there's no other way out. 

If the user's terminal supports UTF-8, and if Info can convert between
compatible encodings, then Japanese text can be displayed on an
otherwise non-Japanese machine.  And btw, it's not unusual to have
Japanese fonts on a machine that has nothing to do with Japan.

Bottom line, if we limit the user to only what @encoding said, we
limit the number of installations that could display the text, even
though otherwise they could technically do that.