bug#31614: Off Topic (was: bug#31614)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Van L <van@scratch.space>
> Date: Mon, 28 May 2018 21:05:35 +1000
> Cc: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> > Eli Zaretskii writes:
> > 
> > You are saying that the Texinfo manual uses ASCII quotes, and therefore
> > the opening and closing quotes are identical?  If so, the place to
> > complain about that is the Texinfo mailing list.
> 
> The point of TeX is beautiful typesetting.

Yes, it is.  But whether makeinfo produces the curved quotes and other
non-ASCII characters can be controlled by the Texinfo source files,
and the Texinfo project evidently decided not to produce Info files
with non-ASCII characters, while Emacs made the opposite decision.  So
it's their decision, and if you want to convince them to change it,
you need to talk to them, as Texinfo is a separate project.

> Emacs 26.1-rc1 (NS Port) and Emacs 25.3 (Mac Port) both produce
> 
>   4 (#o4, #x4, ?\C-d)
> 
> In the below, it is not possible to set 
> `eval-expression-print-maximum-character’ to `nil’ to 
> achieve the simple `4’ result. 
> `M-x customize’ wants a number for 26.1-rc1 and the default is 127. 

AFAIR, we never had such a feature, and the name of the option even
hints that all it controls is the character representation of the
integer number, as does its doc string.

> The backtrace diff I submitted in another bug needs undoing 
> because I believe the simple `4' result is better to keep in the earlier lisp 
> intro.

I don't think it's a good idea to mix Emacs customization with the
Lisp programming introduction.  I described the additional
representation of the value in a footnote, and I think this is good
enough for that place to get the reader past the complication.  If we
start talking about customizing this display, we will risk losing the
main point of that node.