Jaime E. Villate writes:
> On Mon, 2006-11-06 at 07:50 -0700, Robert Dodier wrote:
>> Can someone else respond?
>> An additional question which I have, to what extent is it possible to
>> use non-ascii characters in texinfo files? e.g. utf-8 or accents or
>> other diacriticals in iso-8859-1. TeX itself is not comfortable with
>> non-ascii, but maybe makeinfo or maybe texi2html? Or maybe it is
>> necessary to always write @ tags to indicate non-ascii characters.
>
> LaTeX has a package (inputenc) that can be used to accept either
> utf8 or latin1 in the input file.
> But texinfo is more problematic. The method we are currently using
> in the Portuguese and Spanish translations of the Maxima manual
> is using only ASCII; that means that @ tags must be used for
> accented characters.
This is not 100% true. At present Spanish and Portuguese .texi
contain some (quite few) non ASCII chars. Try to apply iconv ftom
latin1 to utf8 and observe the difference. I'm sure this is not
intentional but apparently make no trouble. It seems that non-ASCII
charsare OK in the body of text but they aren't welcome
in manus and headings. I've tried this with Russian where situation
is more complicated - all letters are non-ASCII.
> The conversion into latin1 and utf8 info files is handled by the
> Makefiles in doc/info. The conversion to latin1 is made by the
> program makeinfo, and then the latin1 to utf8 conversion is done
> using an external program (either iconv or recode).
In any case probably there is universal cure for texinfo non-ASCII
idiosyncrasy - devise preprocessor which will convert 8-bit .texi
into the form which make texinfo happy. Keeping all non-ASCII
in @ forms is very inconvenient especially for any non-latin
language like Russian. In few days I'm going to dive into Russian
translation project which includes devising appropriate framework
for texinfo converting alt least to .info and .HTML for three
Russian encodings. Hope this will be helpful for other languges
as well.
> The way Vadim has set up the Makefiles requires two subdirectories in
> doc/info for the Italian translation: it and it.utf8
> The translated .texi files should all go into the it directory. In the
> it.utf8 directory there should be only one .texi file, maxima.texi,
> which will be a copy of the maxima.texi file in the it directory,
> but changing all the lines:
>
> @include something.texi
>
> by
>
> @include ../it/something.texi
>
> Two more things to keep in mind in the translated .texi files:
>
> - expand all tabs into spaces
And not a single Windows style CR-LF end of line!
I'm planning to insert automatic Tab and CL-RF
conversion somewhere into Makefile.
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov
<vvzhy at mail.ru>
<vvzhy at netorn.ru>