Re: Snippet 706: Generating custom flags

[David Kastrup]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:

>>> By your patch, address@hidden' and address@hidden' are no problem.  † and ‡ 
>>> occur no
>>> errors but they are missed in PDF.
>
> Yes, there are more problems in texinfo.tex with non-8bit engines – it
> seems that the complete UTF-8 logic is severely broken in that case.
>
> For 8bit engines, the glyphs for † and ‡ are taken from other fonts,
> but this mechanism fails for both luatex and xetex.
>
>> I think it's safe to say that this patch is not going to help.
>> We'll need a fix in texinfo.tex.
>
> Yep.  It's really surprising that noone has ever reported those
> problems, which certainly exist since a few years...

My guess would be that Karl Berry considered "this newfangled stuff none
of my beeswax" at a time when those engines (as well as non-ASCII input
and/or fonts) were less common.  Now that they are more common and Karl
is no longer the main driving force behind texinfo.tex, it might be
worth bringing up the topic on the Texinfo mailing list again(?).

-- 
David Kastrup