Re: luatex problems with texinfo.tex

[Gavin Smith]

On 31 December 2015 at 23:32, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>     Does anyone know how to check whether luatex or xetex is being used
>     in TeX?
>
> \luatexversion
> \XeTeXrevision
> See, e.g., ifxetex.sty, ifluatex.sty, ifplatform.sty.
>
> You also want to know if (for luatex) the output is PDF (ifpdf.sty, good
> luck reading that one), which gets more complicated.  And upcoming
> incompatibilities in luatex will make the situation worse, as I wrote
> you before, Gavin.

The links and other PDF features you mentioned you mentioned may not
work, but I'm not convinced it's a high priority, at least for now. If
people want those features they can use pdftex or pdfetex instead. I'm
sure that's what texi2pdf uses, anyway. It would only be a problem if
people didn't have pdftex installed.

>     Is there a simple correspondence between
>     naming of 8-bit Computer Modern and the super fonts?
>
> I wouldn't call it "simple".  There is code in texinfo.tex now
> (\etcfont) to use cm-super, via the ec* and tc* tfms, for various
> characters not present in CM, such as eth, thorn, ogoneks (@DH{}, @TH{},
> etc.).  Switching to it for everything does not seem like a good idea to
> me, since it is certainly possible to have a usable TeX installation
> without cm-super at all.  And, I fail to see how cm-super solves
> anything about UTF-8.

Agreed.

>     Do you know of any way to go back to byte-wise input instead
>     of input by UTF-8 characters?
>
> Of course it's possible (and I think it is the right thing to do),
> otherwise the millions of TeX documents not written in (not to mention
> predating) UTF-8 and Unicode could not be processed by those engines.
> However, I'm afraid I don't have simple chunks at hand for the job.  I
> wish I did.  But you can look up the documentation and figure it out at
> least as well as I can.  -k
>

This appears to be the code to get the byte values into LuaTeX:

http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/Process_input_buffer#Latin-1

It needs a bit more background knowledge before it can be copied and
pasted into texinfo.tex.