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

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 10:40:41AM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> 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.

If --disable-encoding is passed, then utf8 quotes are not produced, but
then ascii transliterations are used for accented characters from
@-commands too.  However, I can't really imagine a situation where you 
want accented characters in utf8 and not the quotes.  Either your
terminal is utf8 aware or not, I see little point in separating
different cases.

That being said, adding a customization variable like 
NEVER_OUTPUT_UNICODE_QUOTES
would be trivial to do.

-- 
Pat