support of Japanese in makeinfo

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

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Hello,

I was encouraged by Richard Stallman and send this message.  I'm
participating in the development of some Emacs Lisp softwares and
have the chance to write the TexInfo manuals in Japanese.  Since
the makeinfo command doesn't support Japanese text, I always put
the rule which uses the Emacs Lisp based makeinfo, that is, the
texinfo-format-buffer function, into those Makefiles.  Probably,
developers in China and Korea will do the same because of the
same reason, although I'm not familiar with those languages.

Is there a chance that the makeinfo command supports Japanese
text?  I heard someone in Japan has tried to modify it so as to
support Japanese text years ago, however it didn't seem to have
been successful.  I wish the makeinfo command could support
languages which correspond to many locales defined in the
/usr/lib/locale directory.  Unfortunately, I'm not good at C.

There are four encodings which are generally used for Japanese
text; they are ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP, SHIFT_JIS and UTF-8.
ISO-2022-JP uses only 7-bit data, but some characters which are
special to makeinfo, for example, `@' and `{', will appear in
the raw data.  EUC-JP uses only 8-bit data, is popular in the
Unix-like systems as well as ISO-2022-JP.  SHIFT_JIS uses a
mixture of 7-bit and 8-bit data, mainly used in MS Windows.

In addition, there are special conventions used in Japanese
text.  The typical ones are as follows:

1. Japanese words are not separated by spaces as if they look
   "Japanesewordsarenotseparatedbyspaces".

2. Lines can be broken even in the middle of a word.  However,
   ASCII words embedded in Japanese sentences cannot be broken.

3. There's no space between the Japanese comma or the Japanese
   period and the beginning of the next sentence.

4. There are special rules called `kinsoku'.  Some characters
   including Japanese comma, period and dash, small kana
   characters and the right parenthesis should not be places at
   the beginning of lines.  Contrarily, the left parenthesis and
   so forth should not be placed at the end of lines.  In Emacs,
   they are defined in the lisp/international/kinsoku.el file.

I would greatly appreciate making the makeinfo command support
them.  I attach an example of the Japanese TexInfo file below.

Best regards,


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