When running :helptags, it sometimes aborts with no generated tags file and an error message (I forget the error number) saying that the helpfiles are not all in the same encoding. One possible case is if UTF-8 with and without BOM are mixed. But helpfiles distributed with Vim are not all in the same charset, see below, and yet :helptags accepts them.
Nothing about a "common encoding and BOM status" requirement is mentioned under under ":help :helptags" (options.txt, last change 2017 Mar 19, lines 204sqq) unless it be the cryptic mention "*E154* *E150* *E151* *E152* *E153* *E670*" at line 205. I just noticed that among the helpfiles distributed with Vim, while most are in 7-bit US-ASCII (byte-for-byte compatible with most ISO-8859 encodings including Latin1 and also with UTF-8 without BOM) options.txt, arabic.txt and hebrew.txt (at least) are in "real" UTF-8 without BOM, while farsi.txt is in some 8-bit encoding not compatible with UTF-8, which after some detective work I tentatively identify as ISIRI-3342 (not the "ISIR-3342", unknown by iconv, mentioned at lines 171, 172, 190 and 191 of farsi.txt). (Vim of course detects it as Latin1, the 8-bit "catchall" charset at the end of 'fileencodings'; in this case this identification is "Vim's best try" but it is mistaken.) How :helptags (as run as part of "make install") can accept in $VIMRUNTIME/doc/ this non-UTF-8 charset for farsi. txt together with the UTF-8 of the three mentioned above, while :helptags run manually or by UseVimball balks when encountering in $VIM/vimfiles/doc/ UTF-8 with BOM together with UTF-8 without BOM, leaves me baffled. (My system locale includes $LC_CTYPE unset but $LANG=en_US.UTF-8 so I would expect that « $(VIMEXE) -u NONE -esX -c "helptags ++t ." -c quit » (the command called by src/Makefile "make install" or "make installruntime" via runtime/doc/Makefile "make vimtags" to generate the help tags) would get the "Unicode default" of "ucs-bom,utf-8,default,latin1" for 'fileencodings' and thus get Latin1 for farsi.txt but utf-8 for everything else.) Best regards, Tony. -- -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
