Tom Tromey writes:
Markus> If you use any software that writes `quote', please submit to
Markus> the author a patch and point her to the above URL for
Markus> background information. Thanks!
This is standard practice for all GNU programs, including the output
of "makeinfo".
I can't speak about 'makeinfo', but for the run-time messages of
internationalized programs the following approach is possible:
- Use a .po file in UTF-8 format, and use U+2018/U+2019 as left and
right quote delimiters.
- The GNU gettext library shall convert the messages from the .po file's
encoding to the current locale's character set (i.e. ISO-8859-1 in
many cases). This is already partially implemented.
- GNU gettext uses iconv. If the U+2018/U+2019 quotes cannot be
represented in the current locale's character set, iconv can choose
appropriate replacement characters (acute and grave accent or, as a
last fallback, the vertical apostrophe).
This will be easily implemented in the free iconv implementations
(glibc-iconv, libiconv, freebsd-iconv). The non-free iconv
implementations are so low quality that they are unusable.
- Programmers must use vertical apostrophe or double quotes in the
english messages in the C source. (The standard way to put Unicode
characters into a wide char string, \unnnn, is not yet implemented
by most compilers.)
- As a consequence, a message catalog for English must be introduced,
in order to map
"He said: 'Hello world!'"
to
"He said: \u2018Hello world!\u2019"
Bruno
