Re: Loss of search facility in info in newer releases of Texinfo

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Pat.

On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 13:44:40 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 11:35:06AM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > Apologies for not being all that clear in my initial post.  I hope I've
> > now made it clear what I'm asking for - as an option, of course.
> > --disable-encoding does not do what I want - it squeezes _all_
> > characters into the ASCII range, rather than just the Texinfo formatting
> > characters.

> It does not change the characters in the text, only the characters
> formatted by texi2any.

The Texinfo manual is somewhat unclear on this point.  The description
of --{dis,en}able-encoding is this:

'--disable-encoding'
'--enable-encoding'
     By default, or with '--enable-encoding', output accented and
     special characters in Info and plain text output based on
     '@documentencoding'.  With '--disable-encoding', 7-bit ASCII
     transliterations are output.  See @documentencoding, and see
     Inserting Accents.

It seems to imply that "accented and special characters" only get output
with --enable-encoding.  It does not distinguish between @"u and ü in
the .texi source, for example.  The manual text seems to state that with
--disable-encoding, ü in the .texi would get converted to ue in the
..info.

This bit of the manual (also the entire manual, I think) says nothing
about whether @code{foo} gets output as `foo' or U+2018fooU+2019.  There
are no directions anywhere that I can see, as how to get ASCII
formatting characters in the .info output.

All the descriptions in the Texinfo manual fail clearly to distinguish
what is done with source characters in the .texi file from how
formatting characters inserted by texi2any are chosen.

> Which conversion is not ok for you with --disable-encoding?

I think G@"uther M@"uller would not be converted properly into Günther
Müller, for example.

> > > If you remove "@documentencoding UTF-8" from a file, the file is
> > > still assumed to be in UTF-8, but less Unicode is used in the
> > > output where it is not necessary.  Does that help?

> > Not really.  I've got too many info files on my system (Gentoo
> > GNU/Linux) to remove that directive from them all each time there's
> > a new version of the file.texi.

> But does the output obtained when removing "@documentencoding UTF-8"
> from the file suit you?

Probably not.  I don't have a suitable test file to try it out on.  But
superficially, yes.  Somehow, I've managed to get an instance of
texinfo.info created with @documentencoding disabled.  It was OK, as far
as I saw.

Again, I am asking for an option which would give a clean, clear way not
to output Unicode >0x7f for the Texinfo formatting characters, whilst
not affecting any of the other facilities for manipulating non-ASCII
characters.  Are you prepared to implement or accept such a facility?

> -- 
> Pat

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).