Hi Robert!
> I don't know much about the details here. 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,
Actually TeX ist quite flexible an can be told what to do with non-ascii
characters... I used the following texinfo code, when writing german
documentation, to enable the use of german umlauts. I guess it should be
easy to adapt this to other languages. Perhaps it is of
use to somebody on the list. It used to work fine but be aware that the
last time I tried it was under Debian potato -- which is now about 5 years
ago.
I wrote the texinfo files in iso-8859-1. At the top of each file there
was the following code:
@iftex
@documentlanguage de
@input umlaute.texinfo
@end iftex
umlaute.texinfo was as follows:
@catcode`@?=@active
@catcode`@?=@active
@catcode`@?=@active
@catcode`@?=@active
@catcode`@?=@active
@catcode`@?=@active
@catcode`@?=@active
@def?{@ss}
@def?{@"A}
@def?{@"a}
@def?{@"O}
@def?{@"o}
@def?{@"U}
@def?{@"u}
HTH, Harald