Hi Patrice, Patrice Dumas wrote: > > My complaint was only about the (apparent / confused) need to use TeXinfo > > syntax *for non-ASCII characters*. > > It should only be required for non-ASCII characters if the encoding of the > po file is us-ascii, for example in pt_BR.us-ascii.po the @-commands for > accents need to be used. > > In other cases, I think that it is best to leave it to the translators. > They can use @-commands if they wish, and not use them if they don't > want to, both for accented letters and, more generally, for styling. > > This is explainined in > https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Internationalization-of-Document-Strings.html > > (though upon reading it I realized that it is a bit out of date...).
In this documentation page https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Internationalization-of-Document-Strings.html some importance is given to the @documentencoding. The @documentencoding is documented in https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/_0040documentencoding.html The way I read this page, it recommends to use '@documentencoding US-ASCII' when possible. When I combine this with what you wrote above, the recommendation is - to use the US-ASCII encoding for the texinfo_document domain PO files, - to use the @-commands for the non-ASCII characters in these PO files. This is what would have been expected in the year 2000. But meanwhile UTF-8 support is wide-spread in so many tools, editors, and viewers. And in texinfo/doc/short-sample-{ja,zh}.texi you have examples with Japanese and Chinese text and fonts, both happily using UTF-8 for input. This leaves me confused. Can we remove the obstacles that (apparently) discourage Japanese, Chinese, Hindi translators from producing PO files for the texinfo_document domain? Gavin observed that many translation teams are not very active. True. But if you give them enough years of time, and if the usual tools & procedures are supported, they will some day do the translations. 1) https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/_0040documentencoding.html talks about the 'coding:' marker in Info files. Is it a problem to have an info file with 'coding: UTF-8' nowadays? If users are in an old-style ISO-8859-1 locale, then the 'info' program will hopefully convert the contents to ISO-8859-1 on-the-fly for display (like it surely does in the opposite case, when viewing an info file with 'coding: ISO-8859-1' in an UTF-8 locale)? 2) https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/_0040documentencoding.html also says "in Info and plain text output ... accent constructs and special characters ... are output as the actual 8-bit or UTF-8 character in the given encoding where possible." Is this a problem? Nowadays, UTF-8 is the standard encoding for text files. It's ISO-8859-1 encoded files which sometimes display in a weird way. 3) "For maximum portability of Texinfo documents across the many different user environments in the world, we recommend sticking to 7-bit ASCII in the input" Is this recommendation still relevant (in view of the Japanese and Chinese support)? 4) https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Internationalization-of-Document-Strings.html Why is the @documentencoding relevant here? Why can't TeXinfo just recode things as needed? I guess that if @documentencoding were made to be irrelevant here, then above you would not need to say "for example in pt_BR.us-ascii.po the @-commands for accents need to be used." since there would be only one pt_BR.po, and translations would pick UTF-8 for its encoding, like they do for so many other translation domains. Bruno
