Re: Standalone 'info' should recode into display's encoding

[Karl Berry]

In my experience, the problem is not specific to Info and not specific
to quotes.  If I run cat or more or ... on a UTF-8 file in a non-UTF-8
terminal, characters are dropped and the result beyond 7-bit ASCII is
garbled.

This has always seemed like a fundamental problem in UTF-8 usage to me,
one that would be better addressed at the terminal level, so at least
one can always see the bytes, if not the "best possible"
transliteration, without every single program that writes to stdout
having to implement the same thing.  But since nothing like that is
going to happen, I suppose Info should somehow deal with it, just like
every other program in the world.  Sigh.  Patches are welcome.

As for controlling the output of quotes by makeinfo, an option could be
invented, but I am not inclined to change the default behavior so I'm
not convinced it has much utility.  We changed it in the first place
because of vociferous complaints about getting ASCII quotes even with
@documentencoding UTF-8.  And after all, there is some logic to using
UTF-8 quotes when the document says it wants UTF-8.  It's no different
in principle than accented letters.

At any rate, the best answer, IMHO, not requiring any changes to any
programs, is simply not to use @documentencoding UTF-8 unless one
actually needs it, which should be never in English-language manuals.
7-bit ASCII source with Texinfo @-commands is preferable.  These days
many people reflexively think that UTF-8 is wonderful, always use it,
and want to inflict it on everyone else too, but that is simply wrong.

karl