Charset issues (was: makeinfo 4.0 work bad)

[Marc Herbert]

> 
> On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, David A. Capello wrote:
> 

> > I attach a documentation example in Spanish which shows with
> > clarity those errors, will be able to see that the file
> > `allegro.info' generated starting from `allegro.texi', not
> > it contains the characters `á' (`a' with accent) in some
> > lines (48, 50, 70, 71, and 72).


On Sun, 11 Feb 2001, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
 
> This happens because the accented a is a 8-bit character whose code is A0 
> hex.  A0 hex is the code of a space character with the 8th bit set.  
> Unfortunately, makeinfo currently uses this code as a non-breaking space, 
> meaning that the space character with the 8th bit set should be left 
> alone in the output.

*Fortunately*, makeinfo uses A0 as a non-breaking space !

A0 *is* the breaking space in all iso-8859-X variants.
 <http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html>

And yes, A0 seems to be the `á' character in the old MS-DOS world
 <http://czyborra.com/charsets/codepages.html>

The iso-8859-x charsets are not the final answer to international
languages problems (see the rest of the site referenced above for
complete information), but there are an infinitely better one than
using the old and not standard MS-DOS codepages. Just try to avoid
these.

Sincerely,

-- 
Marc Herbert