Re: Non-ASCII characters in Info files produced by Texinfo 7.1

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Eli.

On Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 22:12:21 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Texinfo 7.1, released a few days ago, changed the behavior wrt
> characters produced from quotes, apostrophes and en- and em-dashes: by
> default, it now produces the ASCII equivalents.  So, for example, "--"
> in the Texinfo source remains "--" in the produced Info file, where
> previous versions would produce a real en-dash '–'.

> The main reason for this change is that it makes it easier to grep the
> Info files.

> To revert to previous behavior, we will need to pass an optional
> argument to the makeinfo command in our Makefile's.  But before I make
> this change, I would like to know if people here want the new behavior
> or the old one.

Thanks for raising this issue on the mailing list.

> For those who want the read about the reasons for this change in
> behavior, here are the links:

>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2022-12/msg00000.html
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2022-12/msg00019.html
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2023-06/msg00000.html

> What do people think about this?

I have always disliked the replacement of ASCII characters by non-ASCII
Unicode punctuation in working documents; it makes those documents less
easy to search, whether by grep or by C-s, or whatever, and these
characters are displayed in an obtrusive face.

Quite likely, there will also be people who dislike the use of ASCII for
these purposes.

So I would vote for either texinfo's new default of using ASCII quotes,
etc., or having a configuration option to set/unset the command line
option to texinfo.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).