Subject: bug#16292: 24.3.50; info docs now contain single straight quotes instead of `'

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 21:22:50 +0300

> Date: Fri, 2 May 2014 11:11:40 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Drew Adams <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
> 
> I don't see a change from `...' to '...' in this recent build:
> 
> In GNU Emacs 24.4.50.1 (i686-pc-mingw32)
>  of 2014-04-29 on ODIEONE
> Bzr revision: 117031 [email-masked]
> Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 6.1.7601
> Configured using:
>  `configure --prefix=/c/Devel/emacs/snapshot/trunk
>  --enable-checking=yes,glyphs 'CFLAGS=-O0 -g3'
>  LDFLAGS=-Lc:/Devel/emacs/lib 'CPPFLAGS=-DGC_MCHECK=1
>  -Ic:/Devel/emacs/include''
> 
> But I've had a report from an info+.el user that his 24.4.50.1
> build breaks the Info+ highlighting of names because '...' is
> used now instead of `...'.  Dunno whether he has control over
> the generation of Info files from Texinfo.

This depends not only on the Texinfo sources of the docs, but also on
the version of makeinfo used by whoever produced the Info files as
part of the Emacs build.  It is quite possible that the latter part is
different between your build and that other user's.

> AFAIK, there is no way, from Emacs Lisp, to know whether an Info
> file has been built to use '...' or `...'.  Is that correct?

Why not?  they are just characters.

> IIUC, at Info build time there is a setting, @documentencoding,
> that determines this.

No, these are ASCII characters, so @documentencoding has nothing to do
with it.  But the version of makeinfo does: the latest versions
produce '...'.

> Request: Could we please have this information transmitted to
> the resulting Info files somehow, so that it could be obtained
> by Lisp code?

It is already there:

  This is ../../info/emacs.info, produced by makeinfo version 4.13
  from ./emacs.texi.

If the version is 5.x, then you should expect '...'.

Note that you could also have Unicode characters there.  It's a mess.