Re: Standalone 'info' should recode into display's encoding

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 20:20:31 -0800
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> 
> For my preferred platforms (GNU/Linux based), this is not much
> of a problem, since I rarely use unibyte locales.  But when the
> topic of formatting manuals containing UTF-8 came up on the
> Emacs bug list, a Microsoft Windows user objected that the
> manual would look bad on his screen, I suppose because he
> uses a unibyte locale.

This has nothing to do with Windows or unibyte locales.  The problem
will pop up in any non-UTF-8 locale on any system.

The main issue here is that setting the document encoding to UTF-8
affects not only accented characters specified as @"a etc., but also
the single and double quote characters, produced by makeinfo for
``..'' quoting and for markups like @code and @samp.  As these are
used _a_lot_ in any Texinfo manual, having them produce characters
that are not expressible in any non-Unicode encoding makes the manual
completely illegible, even in Emacs, which tries to encode each
character such that it will be displayed correctly by the terminal.

One possible solution would be to remove the effect on quotes from
@documentencoding, and provide some separate setting for that.  This
will allow creation of manuals that have some non-ASCII text in UTF-8,
without also affecting the legibility in non-UTF-8 locales.

The proposed enhancement, whereby the Info reader replaces the Unicode
quote characters (and any other characters important for a typical
manual) into their "ASCII art" representation, would also be good, of
course.  But given the time it takes to upgrade, I would suggest to do
both, i.e. both to teach the Info reader to adapt to a non-UTF locale,
and stop @documentencoding from affecting the quote characters.