Re: luatex problems with texinfo.tex

[Gavin Smith]

On 31 December 2015 at 13:48, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> So here's what's happening. When @documentencoding UTF-8 is given,
>> it makes bytes 128-255 active.  However, for LuaTeX, it's actually
>> making characters 128-255 active.
>
> Do we need active characters in that range at all for luatex (and
> xetex)?  The UTF8 support (this is, the code that converts UTF-8 byte
> sequences to Unicode LICR forms) in texinfo.tex should be simply
> skipped since it is unnecessary.

I agree it should be skipped. The only drawback is that documents may
look slightly different between tex/pdftex and luatex/xetex due to
different glyphs being used, but the alternative is that characters
that don't have explicit support in texinfo.tex don't work in
luatex/xetex, which seems undesirable.

Does anyone know how to check whether luatex or xetex is being used in TeX?

> Note that there is another bug: For 8bit engines, the glyphs for † and
> ‡ are taken from other fonts, but this substitution mechanism fails
> for both luatex and xetex – a simple solution would be to use the CM
> super fonts instead of 8bit Computer Modern.

The part of texinfo.tex that deals with fonts is quite long so I am
afraid of breaking something. Is there a simple correspondence between
naming of 8-bit Computer Modern and the super fonts?