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

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 08:09:33PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> It is supposed to be consistent with what the Perl code does and what 
> TeX does.  (I would have to check whether texinfo.tex did assume Latin 
> 1.)  TeX most naturally works with single-byte encodings.

Testing it further, I found that non-ASCII Latin 1 characters wouldn't 
be printed at all if "@documentencoding ISO-5591-1" were not given.  
So making UTF-8 the default wouldn't break any TeX output, at least.
It wouldn't break Info output either: testing with the Info browser, if 

Local Variables:
coding: iso-8859-1
End:

is not in the file, the Info browser doesn't display the non-ASCII Latin-1
characters either, but displays escape sequences instead.

Latin-1 does appear to be the default input encoding for HTML output, 
though, with Latin-1 in the input converted to UTF-8 in the output.  
(This is just the results of me doing a quick test: there may be other 
factors affecting the results.)

I propose we make UTF-8 the default and clearly document this.  Anybody 
relying on a Latin-1 default is getting broken behaviour anyway in 
various output formats.