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

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 13:36:43 -0700

On 05/02/2014 12:33 PM, Drew Adams wrote:
> I thought Eli was saying that it does just that: '...'.

Your user is reporting that, so that's what Eli is diagnosing. The point 
is that makeinfo shouldn't be doing that.

>> Perhaps your info+.el user could investigate why makeinfo is
>> misbehaving for them,
> Can you suggest how?

Run 'makeinfo' on the attached file t.texi and look at the quoting in 
the output file t.info. It should use ASCII accent-grave and apostrophe 
with old texinfo, and Unicode curly single quotes with new texinfo. 
Similarly, the double quotes should use ASCII undirected double-quote 
(both times) with old texinfo, and Unicode curly double quotes with new 
texinfo.

> I would still want Info+ to be able to easily test, using Lisp, which 
> is being used in the current Info buffer: `...' or '...'.

Info files should never use the latter in Emacs 24.4, so this shouldn't 
be a problem.

Down the road there may be a problem, as we really need to accommodate 
new Texinfo. It has been suggested that we change the Emacs build 
procedure to transliterate the output of new Texinfo so that by default 
it quotes 'like this' instead of ‘like this’. I think this would be a 
mistake, and your recent bug report gives another argument against it.

For your planning purposes, here is a list of non-ASCII characters that 
are generated by new Texinfo when applied to the Emacs documentation as 
of January or so. You might want to check that info+.el handles these 
characters, as some users will run into them either because they built 
the manuals themselves with new Texinfo, or because they're reading 
manuals generated by other GNU projects. I think Emacs is the only 
holdout that still insists on old Texinfo.

' ' (i.e., NO-BREAK SPACE, U+00A0)
'真' (i.e., Han character 'real, actual, true, genuine', U+771F)

¤ © ¬ » À Å ß à á ä å ç è é ê ì í ï ò ó ö ø ü ć č ł ń ő Š š – — ‘ ’ “ ”
• … → ↦ ⇒ − ≡ ⊣ ★