Re: texinfo should support Emacs coding specifier

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2015 12:00:53 +0000
> From: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
> Cc: Per Bothner <address@hidden>, Texinfo <address@hidden>
> 
> >> "The '@documentencoding' command declares the input document encoding,
> >> and can also affect the encoding of the output."
> >
> > A plain-ASCII document could produce a UTF-8 encoded Info manual, no?
> 
> This is subtle. It's true that a plain ASCII document is encoded in
> UTF-8 (because ASCII is a subset of UTF-8), but the effect of a
> "@documentencoding UTF-8" directive in such a case wouldn't be on the
> interpretation of the input, but on the output for Info and HTML.
> 
> XML and Docbook output always uses UTF-8, and DVI or PDF output
> doesn't have an encoding. I wouldn't see anything wrong with an option
> being added to texi2any to specify the output encoding for Info or
> HTML in spite of any @documentencoding command. It's even possible
> that the default encoding of the output could change in the future:
> for example, if @documentencoding is in some strange encoding, and the
> user is using a UTF-8 locale, it would be likely better for the output
> encoding to be UTF-8.

So perhaps we should tell in the manual that @documentencoding tells
texi2any how to interpret non-ASCII characters in the source file, but
not say explicitly that it "declares the document encoding".