Re: character sets as they relate to “Raw” string literals for elisp

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> This does not seem to happen in (info "(texinfo) Conventions"):
>>
>>     * Use three hyphens in a row, '---', to produce a long dash--like
>>       this (called an "em dash"), used for punctuation in sentences.
>
> You mean, you expected to see em dash there?  They deliberately used
> @samp{---} to prevent that, because otherwise the text would be
> confusing: it talks about typing 3 dashes in the Texinfo sources.  And
> texinfo.texi doesn't have "@documentencoding UTF-8" which AFAIR is
> required for the generation of non-ASCII characters from these
> multiple dashes.

Sorry, I actually meant that I think the above looks like I think it
should.

- In the first case, they use "@samp{---}" and it displays correctly.
- In the second case, they use "---" and it displays correctly (as two
  HYPHEN-MINUS).

IOW, when I wrote "that does not seem to happen" what I was trying to
say was: "in the texinfo manual, the display looks correct to me", but I
managed to say what I meant in a rather confusing and unclear way.

> What is the bug that you want to fix here?  I'm not sure I understand.

Yes, that's my bad for not speaking clearly.  :-)

What I mean is that I think it would be better if our manuals displayed
em dash (written as "---") as they are displayed in the texinfo manual:
"--" (HYPHEN-MINUS, HYPHEN-MINUS), instead of as "—" (EM DASH).  I find
the former way to display this character easier to read in the monospace
fonts that we typically use.

Alternatively, I think it would also be easier to read if it was
displayed as " — " (SPACE, EM DASH, SPACE).

If we had width fonts here, I expect that "—" (EM DASH) would be fine in
most commonly used fonts.