Re: @math{-} does not produce a minus sign in Info

[Gavin Smith]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2022 at 03:48:47AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2022-10-26 02:57:55 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > On 2022-10-25 14:51:46 +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > FWIW, the Info file currently outputs with
> > > 
> > >      ‘−’ is a minus sign generated with ‘@minus{}’,
> > > 
> > > The − there is not an ASCII character.  Note also the directional
> > > quote marks.
> > > 
> > > It's possible you have an old version of the manual,
> > 
> > This is the Debian/unstable version (texinfo 6.8-6+b1). So this is
> > the latest release.
> 
> Well, this should have worked even with this version... I've done
> some tests, and it appears that in Debian, UTF-8 is not the default
> input encoding! I've just reported a bug:
> 
>   https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1022789

That's almost certainly not a bug in Debian.  The handing of output
characters with suitable ASCII outputs has changed since the last
release.  As Patrice mentioned, there is a new ASCII_PUNCTUATION
variable that bears on this issue.  @documentencoding used to have
an effect on this (that I thought was clever at the time, but it turned
out not to be), but now ASCII_PUNCTUATION controls the use of ASCII output
for commands like @minus{}.