Re: makeinfo should quote 'like this' instead of `like this'

[Karl Berry]

    A better alternative might be for makeinfo to create info files
    containing the utf-8 directed quotes, 

If the user says to use UTF-8, that happens now.  We certainly don't
want to use UTF-8 quotes in otherwise 7-bit-ASCII Info/plaintext output.

    A related question: how does/should makeinfo+info handle non-ascii
    characters in the source?  For example if I'm writing documentation
    in Norwegian.  Is the info output supposed to be locale-specific?

The question is not the language so much as the encoding.
(make)info doesn't convert between encodings, if that's the question.

If you put @documentencoding ISO-8859-1 in Texinfo, say, makeinfo puts a
Local Variables: section in the Info file specifying that coding: value.

    [Most of you know my opinion in this matter: info as a *file* format
    should be killed dead and replaced by some variant of [X]HTML.  

For that to happen, Emacs has to stop reading Info files and start
reading the XML output.  I am not aware of anyone working on that, but
then, I probably wouldn't be.  Probably rms would have to retire before
any such change has a prospect of succeeding :).

Right now, Emacs (post-21) tries to read semantics in Info files and
remove the colons from menus, xrefs, etc., and do all manner of fontish
things.  I think that's the worst of both worlds, but then, no one asked
me :).

karl