On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 08:09:33PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > It is supposed to be consistent with what the Perl code does and what > TeX does. (I would have to check whether texinfo.tex did assume Latin > 1.) TeX most naturally works with single-byte encodings.
Testing it further, I found that non-ASCII Latin 1 characters wouldn't be printed at all if "@documentencoding ISO-5591-1" were not given. So making UTF-8 the default wouldn't break any TeX output, at least. It wouldn't break Info output either: testing with the Info browser, if Local Variables: coding: iso-8859-1 End: is not in the file, the Info browser doesn't display the non-ASCII Latin-1 characters either, but displays escape sequences instead. Latin-1 does appear to be the default input encoding for HTML output, though, with Latin-1 in the input converted to UTF-8 in the output. (This is just the results of me doing a quick test: there may be other factors affecting the results.) I propose we make UTF-8 the default and clearly document this. Anybody relying on a Latin-1 default is getting broken behaviour anyway in various output formats.
