Re: texinfo should support Emacs coding specifier

[Gavin Smith]

On 25 December 2015 at 23:22, Per Bothner <address@hidden> wrote:
> There is an Emacs standard for specifying the character encoding of a file,
> by putting 'coding: ENCODING' in the mode specifier.
> The texinfo specification should follow this standard; it is extra
> weird to not do so when the texinfo specification does require a mode
> declaration.

It is not required, but is an option to mark the encoding for text editors.

> I.e. following file-start should be allowed - and recommended:
>
> \input texinfo.tex      @c -*-texinfo; coding: utf8 -*-
>
> The existing @documentencoding works, but that does not preclude using
> 'coding:'.

I don't see that this solves a real problem. @documentencoding works
well enough. I don't see the benefits in making Texinfo syntax more
heterogeneous in this way; it would make it harder to learn and use,
especially for people who don't use Emacs.

> For one thing: The texinfo manual has a buglet: The @section title is
> 'Set Input Encoding' when it should be 'Set Input and Output Encoding'.

Good point, although it does say that in that section that
@documentencoding can affect the output encoding. It's more true that
it affects the input encoding though. Was there a problem in finding
out what the output encoding was?

If the duplication of the encoding information is a problem, maybe the
Emacs mode for Texinfo could recognize a "@documentencoding" command.