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

On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 08:47:40PM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> 
> I think it is also undocumented that texi2any puts Unicode punctuation
> characters around things like @code{foo}.  It sometimes uses ASCII
> punctuation characters instead.  Which it uses and when, I think is also
> undocumented.  If so, that is also not good.

It is partly documented, but not completly.

> @documentencoding appears to be doing three jobs, which I think really
> ought to be done by separate directives: (i) It specifies the encoding
> used in the .texi file; (ii) It specifies the encoding to be used in the
> ..info file; (iii) It specifies whether to use Unicode or ASCII markers
> around @code{foo}, etc.  I'm not sure it does any of these jobs well.

I agree that (iii) should be unrelated to specifying (i) and (ii).

In texi2any, (ii) can be modified with the customization variable
OUTPUT_ENCODING_NAME.  So (i) only sets the default for (ii) which seems
right to me.

Since we consider input files to be utf-8 when there is no @documentencoding,
it means that the output encoding is utf-8 in the default case too,
which I think is the best as a default nowadays.

-- 
Pat