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

[Raymond Toy]

On 6/5/23 10:50, Gavin Smith wrote:

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.

I added --set-customization-variable OPEN_QUOTE_SYMBOL=' --set-customization-variable CLOSE_QUOTE_SYMBOL=' to the invocation of makeinfo. This seemed to work. Kind of. We have:

11 Maxima’s Database
********************

* Menu:
* Introduction to Maxima's Database::

That’s an actual apostrophe. However, I think maxima parses the info file using the section title:

11.1 Introduction to Maxima’s Database

and that’s U+2019, not an apostrophe (U+27).

This isn’t catastrophic. There appear to be only two places where this happens so I can just make a special case for them.

.

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