Re: Info pages opened with an incorrect coding system

[Karl Berry]

    Perhaps I'm confused: if Texinfo commands are not the recommended
    way, 

The Texinfo commands aren't unrecommended either.  Both ways have their
advantages -- it depends on the document.  That's why we support both.

    then why do we have them? why not tell users to always use
    literal non-ASCII characters?

Because there are many, many cases where the document is 99+% English,
representable in 7-bit ASCII, but a few special characters and/or
accented letters are needed.  It would be horrible to force users into
the whole encoding madness just for that.

On the other hand, for a whole document written in Polish or whatever,
it is exceedingly painful to have to resort to the accent commands; it
makes the source nearly unreadable.  That's when having the 8-bit chars
is useful.

Things have been this way for decades.  It's not going to change.

Anyway, back to the suggestion at hand: fine, I will make the
--enable-encoding behavior the default when @documentencoding is
specified in the upcoming release.  I hope it helps.

karl