Re: ISO-8859-1

[Simon Josefsson]

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

>     jas@@latte:~$ idn --quiet räksmörgås blåbærgrød
>
> I'm sorry to report that in general eight-bit characters in Texinfo
> documents simply aren't processed right by texinfo.tex.

Ouch.

> 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.)

It seems I actually did have 'omega' installed.

I don't know about TeX enough to aid in implementing this, but I have
one comment:

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

Yes.  Storing UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 in *.texi should work, IMHO.

I only have ~20 occurrences of non-ASCII in my manuals, so the @
approach could work during a transition, but it causes problems when
the texinfo source is generated from other sources, e.g., source code.

One of the occurrences is a human name, and it isn't nice to see the
name mutilated in the PS/PDF output...