On Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 08:02:37PM +0000, Vincent Belaïche wrote:
> ​​This is a continuation of report:
> 
> https://tug.org/pipermail/latexrefman/2026q1/000983.html

You wrote:
> I switched to export LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8 and the compilation worked !
> The document has a @documentencoding UTF-8 statement, it would be
> great if texi2pdf / texi2dvi would autonomously pass the correct
> locale to AWK based on @documentlanguage + @documentencoding
> statements.

I didn't reply, partly because I was busy, but partly because I didn't
really have any idea of what suggest for a solution.

> To summarize the point: it would be great if texi2pdf / texi2dvi would
> autonomously pass the correct locale to AWK texindex script based on
> @documentlanguage + @documentencoding statements.

Alas, systems tend to have limited locales installed and will be unlikely
to have all the locales supported for any language/encoding combination
that may occur in a Texinfo document.  So I'm afraid your patch is completely
the wrong approach, in my humble opinion.

I propose solving this in a more limited way: allow texindex, if possible,
to operate in a UTF-8 mode, regardless of the system locale encoding.
texi2dvi could direct texindex to operate in this mode.

Arnold Robbins, who wrote the current texindex program, suggested an
option to texindex to operate in such a mode several years ago, although
as far as I know this never progressed and we never found out if it would
really be possible (or if it would cause issues for awk programs that weren't
gawk).

Here was an earlier thread on it:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2022-11/msg00008.html
From: Werner LEMBERG
Subject: `texindex` output depends on locale settings
Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2022 10:02:44 +0000 (UTC)

I will try to ask Arnold if he has any ideas how to proceed.



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