On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Dmitry Sivachenko wrote:
> > Note, that it is unlikely that one will want to process texinfo-file
> > without having the appropriate locale in the system.
>
> I disagree. Why is it ``unlikely'' for me to produce a Russian
> document? I have all the tools on my system to display, edit, and print
> such documents. I can also send them via email.
>
> Because you don't speak Russian, I suppose :)
Actually, I do ;-).
> If you use Russian, I assume you have
> a) russian locale on your system
I cannot use the locale, because it will disrupt other languages. The
tools I use don't depend on the current locale. One such tool is Emacs
20, which supports many different languages in the same buffer without
any dependence on locales. When I'm reading email written in Hebrew,
Russian, and French, I cannot use the locales.
> Otherwise, you probablyy don't want to process texinfo-file in Russian.
Texinfo currently doesn't support non-ASCII languages for a few reasons.
One of them is texindex, another is makeinfo itself. But TeX does
support these languages, and I hope that it's only a matter of time until
Texinfo will as well.
> If you use many (more than one) languages in a single
> texinfo-file, locale is not sutable. But using of one table for translating
> lower-upper case and character comparison is not enough too.
We will need a separate table for each language, of course. That's what
Emacs does, for example.
> This will require rather big redesign of the whole texindex.
No argument here. And we had better begun sooner rather than later ;-).
