Re: luatex problems with texinfo.tex

[Gavin Smith]

On 2 January 2016 at 19:24, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>>>   I've made attached quick hack patch for texinfo.tex.  The
>>>   following command [to compile the lilypond documentation] does
>>>   not occur `Undefined control sequence.'  with the patch.
>>
>> Thanks for working on this. This patch uses native LuaTeX support
>> for Unicode.  If we wanted to support this in texinfo.tex, it should
>> probably be optional.
>
> Rather not.

Why not? What about the reasons Karl mentioned for defaulting to
bytewise input (assuming we find some way to get that in LuaTeX)?

>> Maybe whether a "@documentencoding UTF-8" line is given should affect
>> whether native Unicode is used by default.
>
> This is the way to go IMHO.

What I was thinking was to use native Unicode support if
@documentencoding UTF-8 was not given, so you can "\input texinfo" and
then type away, so that a lengthy preamble wasn't needed to take
advantage of LuaTeX's character support. The problem would come when a
file was shared with someone who wasn't using LuaTeX: then
@documentencoding UTF-8 would need to be added, switching to
texinfo.tex's own support for Unicode, which would also confirm that
the characters used in the document all had glyphs.

>> Are these changes likely to work for most LuaTeX installations, e.g.
>> will luaotfload.sty exist for everyone?
>
> I think so, yes.  `luaotfload.sty' is an essential part of the luatex
> infrastructure.

OK good.