> ASCII is the common subset of both UTF-8 and most single-byte charsets, > specially ISO-8859-X. > > Can you define what you mean with "pure ASCII"?
As you can see, I already defined ASCII in the message you are answering. ASCII (the common subset of both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-X) are the characters 0x00 to 0x7F. These are the only single-byte characters in UTF-8. Characters >= 0x80 are multibyte in UTF-8 and are shown as two or more random characters in 8-bit terminals. I asked what you defined as "pure" and "unpure ASCII". What is "unpure ASCII"? I gather that by "pure ASCII" you mean exactly 7-bit ASCII, is that correct? > Initially you mentioned issues viewing things on terminals. That has > little to do with not using the eighth bit in a byte, since about one > third of the ASCII table is not viewable on dumb terminals. I never mentioned dumb terminals, but single-byte (8-bit) terminals, like those showing ISO-8859-X. I took simple to mean dumb, what is a simple terminal? Is it something like a VT100? Those cannot display ISO-8859-X or UTF-8 properly, but they handle those just fine. Let's see four examples. (TL,DR, multibyte UTF-8 characters look like shit on 8-bit terminals). This is how maintain.txt should look: Mike Gerwitz mentions that it is intentional that the GCS etc should be using UTF-8, not 7-bit ASCII. So it definitly should not use 7-bit ASCII quotes in that setting. This is how maintain.txt looks on my ISO-8859-15 terminal viewed with ed: What is a ISO-8859-15 terminal? Is it compatible with VT100? But if you are using the wrong locale, of course the results will be strange. Did you try running iconv? Did it work? > This is specially important for 'maintain.info' because it can't be > converted (the tag table becomes incorrect). Any user of a single-byte > terminal will need to rebuild 'maintain.info' from source (as I need to > do to see it in one of my machines). > > Why should it be converted? Info files are meant for an Info viewer, > it would be the task of the Info viewer to adjust its locale. I know of no info viewer able to convert every UTF-8 character to a printable character in ASCII or ISO-8859-X. The info viewer in this machine (info (GNU texinfo) 4.13+) is not even able to convert the three-byte UTF-8 quotes present in maintain.info to ASCII. That is not what I wrote though, I did not say that Info should convert anything only adjust its locale. There is enough information in the Info file to deduce the encoding (i.e. coding: utf-8 at the bottom). So, please, could maintain.txt and maintain.info be coded again in ASCII (as advertised) for maximum compatibility with UTF-8 and 8-bit terminals? Thanks. Lets not make hasty random changes, specially when this one was very explicit. Lets take the time to understand the problem first, and then find a solution.
