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

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Gavin.

On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 07:28:14 +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 10, 2021 at 02:59:39PM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > Thanks, I didn't know about these!  But that would still leave the
> > various forms of double quotes, the EM-DASH, and a few other things
> > in the Unicode style that I don't like.

> > What I want is an option which will output all texi2any's punctuation
> > characters in ASCII, whilst leaving the UTF-8 characters in the .texi
> > source untouched.

> Can you be more specific about where the output occurs?  I believe
> @dfn outputs double quotes while the em dash comes from "---", but what
> do you mean by a "few other things"?

Any and all formatting characters above Unicode 0x7f currently inserted
by Texinfo (as contrasted to those in the .texi source file) I would
like, instead, to have as the "ASCII" equivalents which were used in
Texinfo version 4.x and earlier.

I thought I'd made this clear in the embryonic patch I suggested
yesterday in my post at Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2021 10:18:39 +0000.

Anyhow, the "single quote" keywords listed at
texinfo-6.8/tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm Line 290:

    my @quoted_commands = ('cite', 'code', 'command', 'env', 'file', 'kbd',
      'option', 'samp', 'indicateurl');

, I would like to have marked by ` and ', rather than U2018 and U2019.

@dfn I would like to be marked by " and ", rather than U201c and U201d.

``....'' I also want to be marked by " and ".

@dots I would like to be displayed as ... rather than the Unicode
ellipsis, but I think that is done anyway.

The em dash, from "---" I would like as "--" (or is it "-"?), definitely
not U2014.

If there are any other formatting characters above 0x7f inserted by
Texinfo, I would also like their "ASCII" equivalents to be used instead.

> The options Patrice mentioned in his email fulfil your initial request
> but now you're asking for something else.

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.

> 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.

So, I'm asking you to implement such an option in the next version of
Texinfo, or perhaps accept a patch from me which would do this.

Thanks!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).