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

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 11:07:02 -0800

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> we cannot possibly distribute documentation that looks like
> this in some locales.

Yes we can.  We've been distributing documentation like that for years.
Latin-1 markup (which you're advocating) is not legible in all locales.
It's not legible in Shift-JIS, for example.  And I don't see how Latin-1
markup can work in a text reader in a UTF-8 locale.

> So now we are left with a few files that still specify UTF-8, and
> still screw up text-mode Info readers in some locales.

It's not just the few files that specify "@documentencoding UTF-8".
It's several other files that contain UTF-8 characters, files like
dbus.texi.  These files are being mishandled now, because of the revert,
because makeinfo isn't being told what their encoding is.  And the
first of these files that I found, namely dbus.texi, is specifically
talking about multibyte characters in its example, so converting it
to Latin-1 would destroy the point of that example.

I sympathize with the goal of producing .info files portable to
all locales, but this revert is not solving that problem and it is
making matters significantly worse in other areas.  The other change
you're advocating (converting to Latin-1) would be worse yet.

Instead, I suggest undoing the revert, and adding something to
postprocess the info files, to produce ASCII-only info files.
These could be used in locales that don't grok UTF-8.  Doing
this will avoid screwing up the documentation in .html and .pdf
formats.  I'll volunteer to write that.