Re: Texinfo support for Icelandic

[Arni Magnusson]

Hi again,

I should have added that the Icelandic characters thorn (þ) and eth (ð)
are included in the ISO-8859-1 standard (208, 222, 240, 254), so
@documentencoding ISO-8859-1 doesn't really deliver that.

I think the problem stems from Knuth's early decisions (before the ISO
Latin sets were rolled out) when he handpicked an 8-bit character set for
TeX, optimized for mathematical writing in English.

I should also add that Texinfo creates HTML files with perfect "Það er nú
það" pages, but Emacs Info shows octal escape sequences. The PDF document
is probably the most important output format, in most cases.

Since Texinfo can use the 'cm-super' package to render quotation marks,
I'm hopeful that thorn and eth will make it as well.

Cheers,

Arni



On mið, mars 18, 2009 10:58 pm, Arni Magnusson wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> Please find attached txi-is.tex, my attempt to provide Texinfo support for
> Icelandic.
>
> Alas, it looks like the Icelandic character eth, {\dh}, crashes texi2dvi.
> As indicated in the header comment, I copied as much as possible from the
> LaTeX 'babel' package.
>
> Maybe Texinfo/TeX is simply not able to render the Icelandic character
> thorn (þ) and eth (ð). In case it's relevant, the following LaTeX example
> renders beautifully with the 'cm-super' package installed:
>
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage[icelandic]{babel}
> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
> \begin{document}
> Það er nú það.
> \end{document}
>
> I also tried replacing every {\dh} with a plain d (this is never done in
> Icelandic printed material) and was happy to see "Efnisyfirlit" instead of
> "Contents". The "Index" heading, on the other hand, will always be in
> English, it looks like.
>
> None of the above is written in a complaining tone, but rather to describe
> the issues regarding Texinfo support for Icelandic. The manual I'm writing
> now is in English, but I would be happy to use Texinfo for writing
> Icelandic software manuals for my students in the future.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Arni Magnusson
>