texinfo pretest 4.9.90 available

[Karl Berry]

The first pretest for the next real Texinfo release is here:

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-4.9.90.tar.gz

The interim 4.9 release I made Friday has the main updates to
texinfo.tex and texi2dvi. Now we're moving on to the compiled programs.

Please try it out if you can and let me know if problems or suggestions.
Any notable incompatibilities are unintentional ...

Thanks,
Karl

* Language:
. @documentlanguage now supports an optional country code
specification after the language code, a la gettext.
. new command @allowcodebreaks controls breaks at _ and - within @code.
. new command @frenchspacing controls spacing after sentences.
. new command @fonttextsize allows changing body text font size to 10pt.
. new command @textdegree{} produces the normal degrees symbol.
. new command @thischapternum can be used in TeX headers/footers.
. new option @set txicodequoteundirected produces an undirected quote
in code and example output, instead of the regular right quote.
. new option @set txicodequotebacktick produces a grave accent in
code and example output, instead of the regular left quote.
* makeinfo:
. The @documentlanguage locale is used to translate various document strings.
. new option --css-ref=URL for creating a stylesheet <link> in HTML output.
. new option --transliterate-file-names to use a reduction-to-ASCII
algorithm for split HTML file names, useful for non-Latin-based languages.
. @enddots{} outputs three dots instead of four, for consistency with
texinfo.tex.
. the Local Variables coding: setting written by --enable-encoding now
comes at the very end, after the tags table, so that Emacs can find
it in more cases.
. @allow-recursion (never documented) is deprecated and produces a warning.
. @quote-args (never documented) is now the default behavior.
. centering and such take account of character widths.
. improvements to XML and Docbook output and the DTD.
* texi2dvi:
. pdftexi2dvi is a new wrapper to `texi2dvi --pdf', equal to texi2pdf,
for the sake of AUC-TeX which prepends `pdf' to the compilation
command when requested to produce PDF.
* info:
. look for info files in the current directory first, by default.
. when calling man, use -a if no explicit section is found.
. avoid showing the top(1) man page for nonexistent info files.
* install-info:
. new options --section-regex, --remove-exactly, --debug, --test.
* Distribution:
. autoconf 2.60, automake 1.10, gettext 0.16.1.
. gettext support now [external].
. new translations: hu (Hungarian), rw (Kinyarwandan), vi (Vietnamese).
. most common sources imported from gnulib.

[Patrice Dumas]

What should be the associated unicode point, and transliterated values?

Post by Karl Berry
in code and example output, instead of the regular right quote.
code and example output, instead of the regular left quote.

I don't think it is a good idea to have texinfo language stuff using
@set values. Implementation could set some @value, but I don't think
that the texinfo language itself should do anything with @set values.
So in my opinion it should better be

@txicodequoteundirected on
@txicodequoteundirected off
and
@txicodequotebacktick on
@txicodequotebacktick off


However I don't think that the handling of quotes is right as is. Maybe
I am old-fashioned or something, but I think that in all the code or
verbatim-like commands (like code, command, env, file, kbd, option, samp
(but not for the outside quotes, for the quotes within samp, verb,
verbatim, examples and the like), the quotes should the real ` and ',
and not the utf-8 quotes &lquot;, even in the pdf output. In the text,
using the utf8 quotes seems right to me.

--
Pat

[Karl Berry]

So in my opinion it should better be

Well, I thought about that, but since I didn't really like these
options, I left them implemented in a way I also didn't really like,
with @set :). If you want to make a patch to switch them to regular
cmds, I'll install it.

However I don't think that the handling of quotes is right as is.

I added both those options because, as I recall, lilypond really really
wanted them, so that copy-and-paste from their pdf would work normally
in Acrobat. I wouldn't recommend them to be used without a specific
need to do so.

the quotes should the real ` and ', and not the utf-8 quotes
&lquot;, even in the pdf output.

I think &lquot; is preferable to ` in HTML output. Why not?

As for PDF, well, that was the whole reason for the request. I don't
use Acrobat, but others do ... there's no other practical way to make it
work.

Thanks,
karl