Re: ISO-8859-1

[Karl Berry]

    jas@@latte:~$ idn --quiet räksmörgås blåbærgrød

I'm sorry to report that in general eight-bit characters in Texinfo
documents simply aren't processed right by texinfo.tex.

Omega won't help, though, so it's good you didn't bother to install it.
(Almost all full TeX distributions include it, though, so you don't have
to do it yourself.)  Omega is about Unicode, and there is no Unicode
support whatsoever in Texinfo at present.  (Since Omega is backward
compatible with TeX, more or less, it will work, more or less, on normal
Texinfo documents, but there's no benefit to using it.)

In order to support the usual 8-bit encodings, "all" we need to do is
load different fonts (e.g., EC or Latin Modern or the Adobe fonts) and
tell Texinfo about the encodings, so it knows where to find the
preaccented letters, @AE{}, and so on.  Perhaps using PLNFSS (NFSS for
plain TeX) to be able to reuse some LaTeX infrastructure.

I've thought about this and have sketched some possible user-level
commands, but I haven't implemented anything yet.

I'm also not sure whether it would be better to recommend using
@-commands to generate everything.  The upside is that you can generate
everything with a 7-bit Texinfo source, for maximal portability, etc.
The downside is that then we absolutely would have to support @ commands
in node names.

Of course, since ultimately users just want to use 8-bit chars and have
it do the right thing, I expect resistance is futile.

k


P.S. Notes without explanations on hypothetical font commands for Texinfo ...
(There was some discussion on texinfo-pretest about this.)

@fontencoding text 8t
@fontfamily roman ptm
@fontfamily sans phv
@fontfamily typewriter pcr
@fontfamily math zptmcmr

@fontsize smaller scaled 800
@fontsize small scaled 900
@fontsize main scaled 1000
@fontsize subsection scaled 1315
@fontsize section scaled 1440
@fontsize chapter scaled 1728
@fontsize title scaled 2074

@fontdef rm ptmr8t
@fontdef rmb ptmb8t
@fontdef b ptmb8t
@fontdef bx ptmb8t
@fontdef it ptmri8t
@fontdef itb ptmbi8t
@fontdef sl ptmro8t
@fontdef slb ptmbo8t
@fontdef sc ptmrc8t
@fontdef scb ptmbc8t

@fontdef ss phvr8t
@fontdef ssb phvro8t

@fontdef tt pcrr8t
@fontdef ttb pcrb8t
@fontdef ttsl pcrro8t

@fontdef mi zptmcmr7m
@fontdef sy zptmcmr7y


\rmfamily \ttfamily \sffamily
\upshape \itshape \slshape \scshape
\mdseries \bfseries

Encodings:
ot1 - cmr10
ot2 - cyrillic
t1 - cork
oml - tex math letter
oms - tex math symbol
omx - tex math extended
u - unknown

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/vietnamese/vntex/tex/plain/plnfss/