> Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:06:38 +0200 > From: Patrice Dumas <[email protected]> > Cc: [email protected] > > On Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 01:16:15PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > * there is no reason why a user would want a specific encoding, as > > > interaction with Info is through software, so using one that is > > > practical and can render any character is a good thing > > > > Using characters UTF-8 doesn't support is one (albeit rare) case. > > Doesn't UTF-8 support all the characters?
Almost. There are some characters in CJK locales that are not necessarily in Unicode, depending on what version of the Unicode Standard the editor and the conversion tools support. > In general, it is the other way around, some characters are not > supported by some other encodings. That problem is up to the author of the Texinfo source, so we don't have to worry about it. I was thinking about Texinfo source written in some encoding which might not be entirely convertible to Unicode. > > Another use case is reading the Info file with a pager on a terminal > > that cannot show UTF-8, or in general using the Info file in a > > non-UTF-8 locale, where stuff like Grep might produce mojibake or fail > > to find non-ASCII text entirely. > > These are valid cases, but I think that the reverse is getting more and > more likely, that terminal show only UTF-8, that locales are more and > more UTF-8 and so on. I don't see why the likelihood should matter here. We are not discussing the default, we are discussing whether @documentencoding (or some other directive) should be able to specify a different encoding, even if it isn't the default. > And for these valid cases, it is still possible to set > OUTPUT_ENCODING_NAME. Which is a nuisance (supported only by recent versions of Texinfo), and not easy to discover. > > In general, removing features that were supported for a long time is > > IMO harsh and should be rarely if ever done. But that's me. > > It could also be considered that normalizing to UTF-8 is a kind of > feature nowadays that UTF-8 is everywhere. Again, we are not talking about the defaults. I don't object to have UTF-8 as the default. > > More generally, you asked for opinions, and I provided one. I hope > > it's helpful in some way. > > In any case I will let the last word to Gavin. Fine by me.
