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

[Per Bothner]

On 01/01/2014 10:32 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2014 10:24:18 -0800
> > From: Per Bothner <address@hidden>
> > CC: address@hidden
> >
> > > If so, then it doesn't help in this case, because characters such as
> > > u+2018 cannot be encoded in any encoding I know of except UTF,
> > > certainly not in Latin-N.  What would you have a locale-aware viewer
> > > do in this case, i.e. when the offending characters cannot be
> > > represented in the locale's encoding?
> >
> > It should replace it with some other character, of course.
>
> I don't see how this has anything to do with the locale.

"Locale" may not be the best technical term.  Do you consider a
UTF-8 vs Latin-1 distinction to be part of the locale?  Whatever you
call it, dealing with "missing characters" is part of it.

> Is there any other locale-aware program that does that?

Lots of programs take data in a general format, and "gracefully
degrade" based on user hardware and software (including missing fonts).

> Anyway, Emacs does have means to display one character as another.
> The issue discussed here is that the stand-alone Info cannot (and I
> don't think there's a terminfo-based program out there that does).
>
> > Such translation needs to be mode-dependent: mapping ‘this’ to 'this'
> > is appropriate for info-mode and w3m-mode, but it's probably not desirable
> > for C-mode.
>
> Again, you are talking about Emacs, where this is already possible
> (via display tables that can be buffer-local).  This discussion is
> about the stand-alone Info.

We're talking about what should be in distributed and installed info files.
My point is we should not optimize for 1990s limitations.  It should not
be difficult to add to info a quick pass to replace special characters.

For that matter: Why are we still maintaining the info program?  Why not
just have a script that calls 'emacs -nw'?  Don't say "emacs is too big
or slow" - that is no longer an issue.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/