Re: UTF-8 conversion problem in Texinfo 6.6 with TEXINFO_XS_PARSER

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2019 10:06:15 +0100
> From: Patrice Dumas <address@hidden>
> 
> > I can't remember what I was thinking when I wrote this code, but I may 
> > have been thinking about the case of different encodings in different
> > input files.  I don't think that use case is worth supporting, though.
> 
> I disagree, I think that it is worth supporting that case, as the file
> is the natural scope for encoding.  That being said, the first
> documentencoding could set the default even if it is in an include file.
> 
> Looking at the perl parser, it seems that the encoding is reset for all
> the input files upon reading @documentencoding, so a @documentencoding
> in an include file resets the main file documentencoding.  I would say
> that this is incorrect.

Whether a mistake or not, this command exists in Texinfo for too long
to change it now in backward-incompatible ways.  It always produced a
global setting which was in effect for the whole document.

The main use case of @documentencoding is exactly to specify a single
encoding for the entire document.  The use case you propose sounds
like a much more marginal one.  In fact, I cannot even envision when
would that be useful -- to produce an HTML document where each section
is in a different language, perhaps?

So I think if we want such a file-local encoding, we should introduce
a new command, @fileencoding, say.  That would be backward-compatible.