Re: character encoding of texinfo_document pot file

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 07:09:51PM +0100, Federico Bruni wrote:
> Hi
> 
> The pot template is ASCII:
> $ file texinfo_document-5.0.pot
> texinfo_document-5.0.pot: GNU gettext message catalogue, ASCII text

Indeed, the pot contains only english text.  There could be some quotes
in utf8, but for Info output without @documentencoding ASCII
encoding is assumed, so it seems to be better to use ASCII for the
default strings.

> Some languages have kept the ASCII, even languages which would need
> a better encoding (like french, which had to use crazy characters).

That's on purpose.  Since @-commands are used, this allows to output to
any encoding, including ASCII with transliteration of accents.

This isexplained a bit in
http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Internationalization-of-Document-Strings.html#Internationalization-of-Document-Strings

> The file I submitted years ago is UTF-8. I guess that my PO editor
> changed it automatically. Same for other languages.
> 
> So I think that we can safely use UTF-8.

If there are only accented commands that may be represented with
@-commands, ASCII may be used, otherwise UTF-8 is the right choice.

> Maybe the pot file should be encoded as UTF-8 in first place, in
> order to avoid any problem for translators?

The pot file is in ASCII, and therefore in UTF-8, as ASCII is a subset
of UTF-8...

-- 
Pat