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

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > We changed it in the first place because of vociferous complaints
> > about getting ASCII quotes even with @documentencoding UTF-8.
>
> Well, you now have vociferous complaints to the contrary.

We have one complaint, from you.  In contrast, we have multiple
complaints from users who prefer the UTF-8 approach that's
already in texinfo.

Latin-1 locales are becoming rarer in practice,
and nowadays I suspect they're more often used as test cases to make
sure that software still works on these obsolescent platforms.
It's nice to have this support if it's available, but it shouldn't
get in the way of the typical UTF-8 approach.

> in an otherwise English manual, having
> Unicode quotes makes the manual unreadable.

It's readable.  It's ugly, but it's readable.  Admittedly it's a nuisance,
for those who insist on running in unibyte locales.  But the fix is
simple and readily available: use a UTF-8 locale.

> > 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.
>
> That doesn't stand the test of time

I agree.  There are at least 100 uses of non-ASCII characters
in the Emacs manuals, including (to quote Bug#16292)
'symbols (e.g., "¬"), examples of encoding
("@samp{Naïve} is encoded as @samp{=?iso-8859-1?q?Na=EFve?=}"),
calendars ("Bahá'í"), the names of GNU programs ("真 Gnus"),
and configuration examples ("écrit" in email configuration)'.
Sure, we could reword the manual to ASCIIfy them all, but
these days that would be the tail wagging the dog.