Re: Charset issues (was: makeinfo 4.0 work bad)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Marc Herbert <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 12:19:03 +0100 (CET)
>  
> > 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 !

You misunderstood what I wrote.  Makeinfo removes the 8th bit from any
A0 characters it finds, when it writes the converted text to the
file.  Thus, any A0 characters in the input Texinfo source will end up
as simple ASCII spaces in output.

In other words, try putting some NBSPs into a Texinfo source and you
will lose them even on a system that uses ISO-8859 charsets.

> 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.

The user who reported the problem was using the DJGPP (a.k.a. MS-DOS)
port of Texinfo.  You cannot ``avoid DOS codepages'' when you run
makeinfo on those platforms, because it's the only encoding for
non-ASCII characters that is available to those users.