> Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2015 12:00:53 +0000 > From: Gavin Smith <[email protected]> > Cc: Per Bothner <[email protected]>, Texinfo <[email protected]> > > >> "The '@documentencoding' command declares the input document encoding, > >> and can also affect the encoding of the output." > > > > A plain-ASCII document could produce a UTF-8 encoded Info manual, no? > > This is subtle. It's true that a plain ASCII document is encoded in > UTF-8 (because ASCII is a subset of UTF-8), but the effect of a > "@documentencoding UTF-8" directive in such a case wouldn't be on the > interpretation of the input, but on the output for Info and HTML. > > XML and Docbook output always uses UTF-8, and DVI or PDF output > doesn't have an encoding. I wouldn't see anything wrong with an option > being added to texi2any to specify the output encoding for Info or > HTML in spite of any @documentencoding command. It's even possible > that the default encoding of the output could change in the future: > for example, if @documentencoding is in some strange encoding, and the > user is using a UTF-8 locale, it would be likely better for the output > encoding to be UTF-8.
So perhaps we should tell in the manual that @documentencoding tells texi2any how to interpret non-ASCII characters in the source file, but not say explicitly that it "declares the document encoding".
