Re: character sets as they relate to “Raw” string literals for elisp

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Normally Texinfo represents an em-dash in ASCII output with two
>> dashes, not just one.  It would be `...from a core dump-–provided
>> that a core dump...'

This does not seem to happen in (info "(texinfo) Conventions"):

    * Use three hyphens in a row, '---', to produce a long dash--like
      this (called an "em dash"), used for punctuation in sentences.

They use two HYPHEN-MINUS characters to represents an em-dash.  I also
quickly checked the gcc manual in the Debian stable package, and that
also has the correct em dashes.

> That has changed, since we nowadays by default use UTF-8 encoding in
> our Info manuals.  With that, '---' produces the Unicode em-dash
> character, displayed as a wide dash, and '--' produces a Unicode
> en-dash character, displayed as somewhat more narrow dash (but still
> wider than the ASCII dash).

IMHO, this is a bug that we should look into, as the correct style used
in the texinfo manual is more readable.  As Juri points out, it is not
well suited for a monospace font.

I guess texinfo would need some way to produce the previous style em
dashes, while still using utf-8?  Or something?

Or perhaps we could add some code info.el to add a space on each side of
an em dash, but that seems like bit of a hack.