Re: Displaying characters in user's locale

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> This depends on what files are out there with no encoding specified.
>> Do you know how long makeinfo has output an encoding section? Is it
>> still possible today that makeinfo could output a UTF-8 file with no
>> encoding specified?
>
> It could be, with makeinfo 4.13, I think.
>
> In any case, UTF-8 covers ASCII, so I think it is safe these days.
>
What if a file is not in UTF-8 and doesn't specify its encoding? Is it
likely, for example, that there are many files in ISO-8859-1 which
don't specify their encoding?

>> We rely on iconv to find an exact conversion between characters.
>> Failing that we look for an ASCII replacement.
>
> Yes, I understand, but why do we need a separate function for each
> encoding?  Isn't degrade_utf8 capable of covering all of them?
>
Good point, if a character is not represented for the target encoding,
first convert it to UTF-8, then run degrade_utf8. I was thinking of
doing all in one step.

>> > One of the disadvantages of those degrade_* functions is that you must
>> > match each encoding with a functions, and there are an awful lot of
>> > possible encodings out there.
>> >
>> I've listed all the ones listed in the texinfo manual
>> (http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/_0040documentencoding.html#g_t_0040documentencoding).
>> Hopefully in the future more won't be added and everyone will use
>> UTF-8 instead.
>
> I don't think we can forbid people from using their encoding, even if
> it is not in that list.
>
I don't know what happens if someone puts something like
"@documentencoding GB2312" in their Texinfo source. It doesn't matter
anyway, because I'll use degrade_utf8 for them all as above.