Re: Inconsistency in writing apostrophe in info and html output with version 7.0.3

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2023 at 07:18:00AM -0700, Raymond Toy wrote:
> Maxima grovels over the html file to find appropriate links to use for the
> html version of the manual. This was working fine with 6.8 and earlier
> because I found appropriate regexps to find the links.
> 
> This stopped working in 7.0.3 (and maybe earlier?). The regexps no longer
> work. This is fine; there was no promise that the format of html links would
> be consistent.
> 
> The problem I’m seeing is that in the texi source, we have:
> 
> |@vrindex Euler's number |
> 
> That apostrophe is really an apostrophe character, unicode U+27.
> 
> However, in the generated info file, the index has:
> 
> |* Euler’s number: Functions and Variables for Constants. |
> 

We'd already addressed this problem for Info output:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2023-02/msg00048.html

> The summary is that words with apostrophes, like "don't", should be
> output in Info with an ASCII apostrophe so it is easy to search for these
> words.

The end result of this was that we made the output for ' and `
in Texinfo, as well as hyphen characters, use ASCII characters
by default, with a new customiation variable to control this
(ASCII_DASHES_AND_QUOTES).  This will be included in the next Texinfo
release.

Are you easily able to check this with the current Texinfo development
sources?

If you use Texinfo 7.0.3 then you could try setting OPEN_QUOTE_SYMBOL
or CLOSE_QUOTE_SYMBOL to ' (ASCII apostrophe) to turn this off.

> In emacs , the apostrophe shows up as |\342\200\231|, which is
> Right_Single_Quotation_Mark, unicode U+2019.
> 
> This is a problem because we use the info file as the source of truth, but
> the HTML file only uses an apostrophe, so we end up with an entry that we
> can find in the info file but not in the html file. This did not happen in
> texinfo 6.8.

We should check the output in HTML for these constructs to check they
are what they should be.  Consistency with Info output sounds like a good
idea.  I hope to look into this issue soon.

> Was this intentional? If so, are all apostrophes (U+27) converted to
> right_single_quotation_mark (U+2019) in the info file? That’s something I
> can deal with since it’s consistent.

I think so but it will change in future Texinfo releases.