texinfo-5.9.90 pretest available

[Karl Berry]

Here's the first pretest for the next Texinfo release (which will be
6.0, due to the substantial overhaul of standalone Info and completely
new implementation of texindex), for your testing pleasure:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-5.9.90.tar.xz
 http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-5.9.90.tar.xz

The NEWS below.  Please send feedback here, to address@hidden

* Language:
  . new commands @sub and @sup, for textual subscripts and superscripts.
  . new command @U to insert a Unicode character by code point.

* texinfo.tex:
  . @url/@uref output in PDF now the same as in DVI, showing the url
    even if the second argument is given, not just as a link target.
    TeX option \urefurlonlylinktrue gives previous behavior, of invisible urls.
    PDF-only \linkcolor and \urlcolor specify colors (default black).

* texi2any:
  . customization variable TOP_NODE_UP_URL now replaces all (dir) references;
    recommended setting for GNU packages is /manual/.
  . new customization variable INDEX_SPECIAL_CHARS_WARNING to complain
    when index entries contain a colon.
  . Docbook output no longer uses <lineannotation> for @r.
  . -D'var val' on the command line works as intended again.
  . --plaintext output can be split.
  . a bit faster.

* info:
  . invoking `info foo bar' looks for bar as an index entry in manual foo,
    if not found as a top-level menu item.
  . invoking info with an absolute or explicitly relative file name
    (./foo.info, /tmp/foo.info, etc.) just visits that file.
  . new option --init-file allows overriding ~/.infokey.
  . new command M-x info-version.
  . the M-x kill-node command has been removed.
  . new variable infopath-no-defaults allows omitting the compile-time
    Info directory from the Info search path.
  . separate `infokey' program has been removed - the .infokey file is now
    read directly by Info.
  . new variable `highlight-searches' allows highlighting results from a search
  . support for mouse scrollwheel, controlled by 'mouse' variable.
  . new variable 'key_time' to control how long to wait for byte
    sequences sent by special keys.
  . new variable 'hide-note-references' alters appearance of displayed nodes
  . support input of multibyte characters for searches in a UTF-8 locale.
  . test suite at build time.

* texindex:
  . completely new implementation as a literate program using Texinfo
    and (portable) awk (called TexiWeb Jr.), thanks to Arnold Robbins.
    (Requires gawk 4.0+ if .twjr source is modified.)
  . the -o (--output) is not supported, unless we hear of someone using it.
  . duplicated sort keys with different display texts result in one
    merged index entry, using the first display text.
  . better sorting and parsing in unusual cases; most notably, { and }
    characters can appear as initials.

* install-info:
  . handle compressed input file names containing spaces.
  . exit successfully if --remove is given and the dir file does not exist.
  . new option --defsection, to be used instead of "Miscellaneous" when
    a section is not present in the Info file.

* texi2dvi:
  . look for the environment variable THUMBPDF_CMD instead of THUMBPDF,
    since thumbpdf itself has used THUMBPDF for options since 2000.
  . remove --recode and --recode-from options, since they haven't
    worked as intended for years, so evidently no one needs them.

* Distribution:
  . new translation ca (catalan).
  . automake-1.15, gettext-0.19.4.