[help-texinfo] Re: makeinfo: option for disable fill_column?

[William Xu]

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

> It is true that CJK etc. languages that don't use spaces won't get useful
> line breaking.  The Unicode line breaking characters are not
> recognized.  makeinfo doesn't actually have any understanding of Unicode
> at all, it just passes through its input.

Yes, that is the problem.  If it didn't parse inputs by byte, but by
Unicode, then it would be much easier for handling CJK.  Generally, each
CJK character is considered two ASCII characters wide.  So unlike
English, where we would search back for last inserted whitespace, we
just count current column to see whether it exceeds and adjust
accordingly.  This may require rewriting large part of makeinfo, though.

> I believe any line breaks in the input will be preserved.
>
> Admittedly if you're writing a whole document in Chinese it's going to a
> drag to put @format ... @end format around each node, 

I didn't know @format.  Glad to know, but yes it would be a bit
annoying.  

> but if that's the
> only problem with writing Chinese in Texinfo, we're in much better shape
> than I anticipated :).

I have mostly used the following commands when writing Texinfo: node,
chapter, section, menu, itemize, enumerate, table, example, etc.  When I
disable the filling at all(by modifying the source), the output seems
not too bad.  

-- 
William

http://williamxu.net9.org

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