Re: [help-texinfo] Umlaut strangeness

[Karl Berry]

    When using this in an ISO-8859-1 encoded *.texi:
    @chapter Ãœbersicht

As long as you specify @documentencoding ISO-8859-1 and use the 8-bit
input character 0xdc (your mail is garbled on my system, sorry), it
should work.

Another possibility is to use @"Uber... (all 7-bit ASCII) instead of any
literal character.

    overview of all chapters that appears in Acrobat Reader's side panel?

The PDF overview (aka bookmarks aka outlines) is rendered using a
different encoding than anything else (PDFDocEncoding, a superset of
Latin 1) and with system fonts instead of document fonts.  The @"U
character is at position 0xdc in that encoding (defined in Appendix D of
the PDF reference manual), like Latin 1.  Therefore a UTF-8-encoded
character (where U-umlaut is not 0xdc) will not come out right.

texinfo.tex has never tried to deal with all this perfectly; it would be
a big job.  Instead, rather than pushing what would amount to binary
garbage into the PDF, it uses the "sortable ASCII equivalent" -- clearly
suboptimal in many ways, but that's the status.

Nowadays, PDF bookmarks can also use Unicode strings (UTF16-BE
<FFEF...>).  So the right thing would probably be to translate all
character-generating Texinfo commands into their Unicode equivalents,
thus assuming that the system font being used is UTF-8.  Only for
purposes of the PDF bookmarks, nothing else ... not offering to
implement it, just mentioning :) ... --best, karl.