Re: Improving standalone info usability

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 11:27 PM, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Gavin.
>
> I can certainly appreciate all the work you have put in, and I am happy
> to hear from others on the subject.  But for myself, I'm afraid I simply
> do not like the results.  (I don't like them in Emacs either, not that
> anyone asked me.)  However, since I personally never use the standalone
> reader for "real" work, if there is a consensus that they are
> improvements, I won't stand in the way.  (In which case, it would be nice
> if there was at least an option for the current "plain" output.)
>

This is understandable. I think when you are used to a tool you don't
see the same difficulties and complications that someone who is less
used to it sees. It would be easy to make "tidying up" the output
optional, while parsing the file just the same so that data such as
reference offsets could be used elsewhere, so you would not end up
duplicating everything for the two cases. Others can comment on what
the best styles could be for references and so on.

> P.S. Regarding your other work, on UTF-8 vs. ISO, it still seems to me
> that in principle this should be addressed at the terminal level,
> instead of every single cmdline application having to deal with the same
> problem.  Not that I have any expectation of that happening

I agree that every application shouldn't have to deal with the same
problem and it should be dealt with in some central place. I looked
into using the iconv functions in libc but unfortunately they don't
deal with the case when characters cannot be represented. There may be
other library functions to deal with this but I don't know about them.
Another idea would be to have some kind of wrapper program to convert
output.