hi vadim,
thanks for your help on the utf-8 stuff. i found that
LC_CTYPE=pt_BR.UTF-8 \
xterm -fn '-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1'
and then export LANG=pt_BR.UTF-8 in the new xterm
causes maxima to display the info docs with the special
characters, as hoped. hurray!
i was able to build maxima / sbcl + language packages via rpmbuild
and then view utf-8 (es & pt) and also latin-1 (es & pt) successfully.
however i am not very familiar w/ the font & encoding problems
so sometimes it works for me and sometimes i goof it up.
maxima i18n is really exciting -- the first thing i tried is
to create strings and symbols containing non-ascii characters.
sbcl is entirely happy with strings and mostly happy with symbols,
but i had 2 problems with symbols.
(1) need to execute declare ("<char>", alphabetic); but that
does not invert case. :lisp alphabet shows the declared
alphabetic characters so i copied the inverted-case char
from there ... what we really want is to be able to declare
a whole range of characters as alphabetic. i realize also that
"upper / lower case" doesn't mean anything for some
character sets.
(2) :lisp '<small cedilha> caused sbcl to fall into an endless
loop -- "the octet sequence (195 39) cannot be decoded".
that is pretty annoying! i don't mind if it complains once,
but complaining forever? nope.
well, i am sure that you are already thinking about ways
to work with different character sets in maxima.
let's consider that in more detail post-5.9.3.
thanks so much for all your work on i18n.
internationally yrs,
robert