Re: [help-texinfo] how does one encode a middle dot? and other questions

[Karl Berry]

    at some point, it is envisonned to have a
    command like @U{} to allow to put any unicode point.

We have @U for the upcoming release.  In fact I implemented it
specifically after the discussion of middle dot for Catalan in January
and February.

    The dots are sometimes inside, sometimes outside the square brackets.

Ok, will look.

    checking for a french Unicode locale... none
    Why does it check for that? Is it just for running a test?
    Or would it enable stuff?

It comes from gnulib/m4/locale-fr.m4.  I don't know why or what
dependency pulled it in.  We did not request it explicitly.  The test
result has no particular effect on Texinfo's behavior, so far as I know.

    > Sixth, how do I run texi2any without installing it?
    
I use a one-line shell script:
exec /path/to/texinfo/checkout/tp/texi2any.pl "$@"
I suppose an alias would do as well, if preferred.

    > but what will happen on a machine that does not use a UTF-8
    > locale?  Will the resulting info file still be readable when the
    > above command is used?  How will the guillemet get rendered there?

In my experience, the usual answer is that it will appear as binary
garbage.

In my further experience, the best answer is, don't use
@documentencoding UTF-8 unless it is really needed (e.g., the manual is
not written in English).

Not that anyone cares, but personally I deplore the current trend of
randomly forcing all manuals to UTF-8.  The plethora of resulting
Unicode quotes makes the manuals unreadable in non-UTF-8 environments.
I have taken to replacing the three Unicode bytes with SPC SPC ` and '
SPC SPC so I can use them.

    I wish to check whether makeinfo still produces no blank line
    between the items of a bulleted list (which 5.1 doesn't but
    4.13 did).  

With the test file below, there is no blank line between the items with
either svn texinfo or with makeinfo 4.13 either.

I seem to recall precisely that 4.13 was inconsistent in this regard,
sometimes but not always adding blank lines.  And so when Patrice
discovered this, it seemed like the most user-controllable and
-understandable behavior was to preserve blank lines in the input
between items, but not have the program add blank lines sometimes but
not others.  Pretty sure other manuals used the
no-blank-line-insertion behavior for short lists.

I don't imagine that answer will make you happy, but it's where we are.

    And whether @bullet{} still produces only a * (U+002A)
    instead of a real [binary garbage] (U+2022) in an info file.

With the test file below, I get some multibyte character for the bullet.
I can't tell what it is, but it's probably the one you want.

best,
karl


\input texinfo
@setfilename listutf.info
@documentencoding UTF-8

@itemize
@item i.
@item j.
@end itemize

@bye