Re: pdfeTeX error when compiling lilypond.texi with accents in node names

[John Mandereau]

Hi Karl,

Karl Berry wrote:
>     That is strange, as the attached sample.texi contains node
>     names and section titles with accents, 
> 
> What's happening is that a UTF-8 e-aigu or whatever is turned into the
> regular Texinfo equivalent (@'e) in the aux files.  This isn't ideal,
> but was a first step on the road.  Not doing that leads to many more
> complications.

If I translate every accented character in lilypond.aux (there are
accented characters only in second argument of @xrdef commands) with the
following Emacs macro, running again texi2pdf exits successfully (after
2 pdfetex runs) and a good-looking PDF is produced.

So, as a quickfix, I propose to add a preprocessing routine in texi2dvi
(or a layer in texinfo.tex) that translates UTF-8 accented characters
into Texinfo equivalents in @xrdef second arguments (or wherever this is
convenient).

In the meantime, I'll do this quickfix myself in a preprocessing (sed or
whatever) script (I'm not sure I'd be able to implement it in Texinfo
itself); this will allow us to know whether there are other major
problems with compiling PDF LilyPond manual in French, German and
Spanish.


>     I'm not sure how to solve this.  If first argument of @xrdef is only
>     used internally, 
> 
> Well, the node name is printed in the output from @xref, etc.
> Introducing another layer so that the node name is not used directly in
> control sequence names is possible, but ...
> 
>     is it possible to add a routine which strips accents
>     @-commands in it to avoid the error?
> 
> In principle, that could lead to clashes, although in practice I suppose
> it's very unlikely, so it could probably be a first approximation.

I naively thought the crash was caused by @xrdef first argument in
the .aux file, but as converting accented characters in second argument
makes it work, this looks pointless now.


Additionnally, I have a related feature request: I'd like to be able to
use French and German simple and double quotes in Texinfo TeX output.
Why not use European Computer fonts (ec*) as default fonts, instead of
Computer Modern?  EC fonts provide these quotes whereas AFAIK CM don't.


I'm sorry I can't make propositions more to the point, I'm a newbie in
plain TeX.

John