Re: [help-texinfo] Umlaut strangeness

[Gavin Smith]

On 2 June 2016 at 19:04, Gavin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 1 June 2016 at 16:04, Andreas Falkenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hmm, this is really weird. When using
>>
>>     @documentencoding ISO-8859-1
>>     ....
>>     @chapter 0xdc
>>
>> the character is rendered correctly on the PDF page but not in the bookmarks!
>> If I leave out the
>>
>>     @documentencoding ISO-8859-1
>>
>> then the character is rendered correctly in the bookmarks but not on the
>> page! This is pretty confusing.
>
>> I'm not sure whether you're saying that what I want to achieve is actually
>> impossible or whether it is possible.... from what you've said I'd infer that
>> it should be possible to use umlauts in the bookmarks *and* on the pages
>> if I just use ISO-8859-1 because the bookmarks use Latin 1. But it doesn't
>> work, cf. see above.
>
> The problem is the TeX fonts - they don't use ISO-8859-1. So if the
> document encoding is declared to be ISO-8859-1, each character is
> transformed into TeX commands to print that character, e.g. 0xdc into
> @"U. That in turn becomes U when the PDF outline is generated.
>
> This could in theory be changed, but there are complications, like any
> differences between ISO-8859-1 and the PDFDocEncoding encoding. Only
> ISO-8859-1 could be supported this way.

For what it's worth, the following simple patch gave the correct
character "Ü" in both the outline and the main text:

Index: texinfo.tex
===================================================================
--- texinfo.tex (revision 7190)
+++ texinfo.tex (working copy)
@@ -1427,6 +1427,7 @@
       % we use for the index sort strings.
       %
       \indexnofonts
+      \passthroughcharstrue
       \setupdatafile
       % We can have normal brace characters in the PDF outlines, unlike
       % Texinfo index files.  So set that up.

I'm not confident that this patch is completely correct.