Re: Info pages opened with an incorrect coding system

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2007 17:56:12 -0500
> From: address@hidden (Karl Berry)
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> I could easily change things so that the Local Variables section was
> always output if a @documentencoding was present.  I don't see any
> particular harm in that.

I agree that it should be the default.

> Whether we should start to output 8-bit files
> by default for any input with a @documentencoding, I'm less sure.

IMO, it's pretty much pointless to _not_ output non-ASCII characters,
but still produce the Local Variables section, because without 8-bit
characters the result is a plain ASCII file.  That is, if the Texinfo
source was written well, and used @-commands such as @'e instead of
verbatim 8-bit characters.

IOW, I think the fact that the document specifies @documentencoding
should be enough for makeinfo to obey; relying on an additional
command-line switch is unreliable.

We could have --disable-encoding switch to turn off the default.

>     but it might be better to generate all the Info files in UTF-8.
> 
> Maybe, but it would be a lot of work.  On the input side, makeinfo has
> no special understanding of what it's reading.  If there are eight-bit
> bytes in the input file, it just outputs them as-is, which works well
> enough now; we couldn't get away with that any more.  On the output
> side, this would mean converting from some arbitrary encoding system to
> UTF-8.  Of course changing either of these is possible, but neither is
> easy.

Wouldn't linking against libiconv solve all these with minimal fuss?