Re: Typesetting non-ASCII names in Emacs manuals

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org,  karl@freefriends.org
> Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2011 03:03:16 -0500
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> >> Since RHEL5 is rather old (it ships with Emacs 21), that doesn't bother
> >> me.
> >
> > Well, it does bother me.  Can we please find a solution for this, and
> > if not, revert it?
> 
> A solution for what?

A solution for the warning and -- more importantly -- for producing an
Info file that doesn't render correctly (because it has no coding
cookie, since makeinfo 4.8 didn't recognize the document encoding).

> The latest versions of both Debian stable and RHEL, which tend to be the
> GNU/Linux distributions with the oldest infrastructure, both have
> texinfo 4.13.
> http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/*checkout*/texinfo/texinfo/NEWS tells
> me this supports UTF-8 in info. Older versions of makeinfo will still
> work, just with a few odd characters.

We never required a too new version of Texinfo for producing the Emacs
manuals.  For that reason, we tend not to use latest features of the
Texinfo language.  Why start now, and over such a minor issue at that?

And if "a few odd characters" is not an issue, then why make this
change at all?  It was, after all, to fix "a few odd characters" in
the names of some contributors, wasn't it?

> So I guess the problem is the apparent lack of a readily available
> working pre-built binary of a recent version of texinfo on MS Windows.

That, and the fact that Texinfo doesn't have a Windows-friendly
configury in the distro, yes.  I sometimes build Windows ports myself,
if the available pre-built ones are broken.  But Texinfo 4.8 is not
broken by any measure, and it served me and others very well until
now.  It hardly justifies a significant effort needed to build a port
of a newer Texinfo, and find and fix the reason for the crashes in the
pre-built binaries of Texinfo 4.13.  If this was texinfo-devel, then I
would be expected to be ready to fix the package on whose development
I work, but this is emacs-devel, and all I need is a no-fuss way of
producing the latest manuals as part of building Emacs.  I don't want
to be forced into hacking Texinfo for that.

> I can't help you find a solution for that.

I meant a solution within Emacs.  For example, how about using Latin-1
encoding, and leaving a couple of people whose names need characters
beyond that with their previous ASCII replacements?