[help-texinfo] problems with German characters

[list]

Hello,

I'm using Texinfo for one of my projects.  Well, I can live with it 
for the English documentation, but the German documentation just gives 
me trouble.  Can you help me?

I use
@documentlanguage de
@documentencoding UTF-8

The main problem is using German characters in Nodes. When I used
normal Unicode characters it worked to some extend. But in the PDF
output the table of content in the sidebar was messed up.
It replaced for example "ä" with "a". This is not only weird to read,
but it can even change the meaning.
The headline "Einfache Andwendugs-Fälle" (="simple use-cases")
suddenly became "Einfache Anwendungs-Falle" (="simple use-trap")


When I experimented with the docbook output and tried it with yelp,
those links where even not accessible at all.
I found out, that the docbook output was fine, when I replaced the 
German characters in the Nodes and section-names with @-codes like 
'@"a'. So I was pleased for a moment... until I saw, that this messed
up the HTML-output again. :-(

Another area, which is really problematic is the hyphanation.  I found
the command @hyphenation{} could help me in some cases. But this again
breaks, when there are German characters in a word.
Using "@-" throughout the text is not an option!
Would it be at least possible to switch the hyphenation completely off?
I think, that would be by far the best solution.

-- 
AKFoerster