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

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2014 09:26:29 -0800

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>>> These are very rare (and I would argue will look ugly any
>>> way you typeset them).
>>
>> They're not that rare: for example, I count 949 info lines
>> containing both straight and the curly apostrophes, with
>> many opportunities for confusion.
>
> That's rare in my book

Well, at least I appreciate the promotion from "very rare"
to "rare".  :-)  It's still too common for comfort.

> We've been living with `C-x '' forever

But we're migrating away from it, which is partly what
prompted this discussion.  The question now is whether to
prefer ‘C-x '’ or 'C-x ''.  Of the three notations,
‘C-x '’ is the least confusing, and 'C-x '' the most.

> And if we really care, we can customize
> OPEN_QUOTE_SYMBOL in Texinfo 5.

We should not really care about it.  The Texinfo defaults are OK.

> The systematic principle I propose is to convert everything except
> letters, i.e. only punctuation and special characters.

 From the viewpoint of the unibyte reader that's just weird.
Why should "ß" be converted to mojibake (destroying the point
of a code example) while "•" is converted to "*"
(a mere formatting nicety)?

To be honest, though, I think the whole idea of converting is
wrong, and as long as it's not the default I don't really
care.  If people complain about the conversion I'll just
say "don't do the conversion".  (Or send them to you.  :-)

> It would be a priority if we decide to make that cp-ascii'd output the
> default.

That's not likely.  The general consensus seems to be that
Emacs should just use whatever Texinfo produces by default.
The proper place to reargue what Texinfo does should be in
the Texinfo forums.  Even cp-ascii goes too far, in my
opinion; I think we should just switch to UTF-8 and be
done with it.  But I'm willing to go along with cp-ascii as
a compromise, so long as it's not the default.

If this turns into a problem in practice, and Emacs builders
and/or distributors enable the cp-ascii option more often than
not, we can change the default to use cp-ascii, and use this as
good evidence to argue for a change to 'makeinfo'.  (This is an
unlikely scenario in my view.)