>>> Thanks for working on this. This patch uses native LuaTeX support
>>> for Unicode. If we wanted to support this in texinfo.tex, it should
>>> probably be optional.
>>
>> Rather not.
>
> Why not? What about the reasons Karl mentioned for defaulting to
> bytewise input (assuming we find some way to get that in LuaTeX)?
For me it sounds completely insane to support two different methods of
handling UTF-8 for luatex, given that it can work natively with
Unicode...
> What I was thinking was to use native Unicode support if
> @documentencoding UTF-8 was not given, so you can "\input texinfo"
> and then type away, so that a lengthy preamble wasn't needed to take
> advantage of LuaTeX's character support.
Please not. It's *always* good practice to specify @documentencoding,
and I wouldn't call adding this single line to a document `lengthy'.
Assuming UTF-8 if @documentencoding is not given is not backwards
compatible – as this discussion shows, there aren't many people who
tried luatex or XeTeX for processing texinfo documents with non-ASCII
characters (otherwise there would have been reports about this issue
years ago already).
Werner
