Re: [help-texinfo] Non ascii to pdf.

[tomas]

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On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 02:13:33PM -0800, Karl Berry wrote:
>     texi2pdf is more or less to be deprecated wholesale, right?
> 
> No, texinfo.tex and texi2{dvi,pdf} will continue to exist and be
> maintained.  We must not require LaTeX merely to typeset a GNU manual!

I see. Makes sense.

> The point of the LaTeX backend is precisely to support things like
> Cyrillic, which would be a massive undertaking to implement in
> texinfo.tex.

That's my impression too. That said, I once managed typesetting a mix of
Cyrillic and German (they'd collide when using a naïve 8 bit encoding,
that's the "interesting" point) with UTF-8 input off a plain TeX format
(with Omega). Omega managed to map the input code points to whatever
fonts were available. So, it has been possible at some point to "typeset
UTF-8 with plain TeX" (whatever that might mean). There even were
examples for CJK around.

Alas, Omega seems a bit out of fashion these days, and I don't
understand the mechanisms eTex (or XeT-TeX) use for font mapping.

> The LaTeX backend will also give much more flexibility to
> wasting^Wspending time playing with the layout, for those who like to do
> that.  (Which is precisely not the purpose of Texinfo, but that doesn't
> stop people from wanting to do it. :)

:-)

>       /usr/share/texmf/tex/texinfo/txi-ru.tex
> 
> The txi-LL.tex files exist in the original distribution. [...]

Thanks for the clarifications (and again, for your patience).

> With "limited time"?  Probably not.  It's not like it's a trivial task.
> The current plan is something like this:
> 
> 1) Patrice and I finish up the tidbits to start texinfo 5.0 pretests.
> 2) release that and deal with inevitable urgent fallout.
> 3) a latex backend is one of the highest priorities for Patrice for
> after the release.
> 
> We'll see how it goes.  Everything takes time.  We're all volunteers.

I know that. Should I have given the impression to be impatient at some
point I'd like to apologize: that would have been a horrible
misunderstanding.

Thanks
- -- tomás
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