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

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hi Karl,

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

Aaah... one has to run *texi2any.pl* directly, and not texi2any.
Okay, that works.

> In my further experience, the best answer is, don't use
> @documentencoding UTF-8 unless it is really needed

Well, it must be set in order for the new character-set reducing
feature of stand-alone info to work.  Or at least, the tail of the
.info file must contain "coding: utf-8".

> 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.

But not with the new stand-alone info reader: the left and right
single quote signs get both reduced to an apostrophe here.

(By the way: thanks for getting rid of the backtick as a left single
quote mark.  Phew!  That makes things much more readble for me.)

>     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.

My makeinfo 4.13 messes up the list: it makes "This is..." into
a list item, instead of "i.".

> 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 does.  :)  Now I can control whether list items are contiguous
or separated.   I will just add blank lines to the source, and the
result should be the same in all makeinfos.

>     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.

It is.  So that has improved, too.  Cool.  And also info no longer
sees the AltGr key as an Alt, so now I can also search for accented
characters, guillemets, and anything else I can type.  Thanks!

Benno


> \input texinfo
> @setfilename listutf.info
> @documentencoding UTF-8
> 
> @itemize
> @item i.
> @item j.
> @end itemize
> 
> @bye

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