Previous: documentlanguage, Up: Internationalization

18.2 @documentencoding enc: Set Input Encoding

The @documentencoding command declares the input document encoding. Write it on a line by itself, with a valid encoding specification following.

At present, Texinfo supports only these encodings:

US-ASCII
This has no particular effect, but it's included for completeness.
ISO-8859-1
ISO-8859-15
ISO-8859-2
These specify the standard encodings for Western European (the first two) and Eastern European languages (the third), respectively. ISO 8859-15 replaces some little-used characters from 8859-1 (e.g., precomposed fractions) with more commonly needed ones, such as the Euro symbol.

A full description of the encodings is beyond our scope here; one useful reference is http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html.

Specifying an encoding enc has the following effects:

In Info output, if the option --enable-encoding is given to makeinfo, a so-called `Local Variables' section (see File Variables) is output including enc. This allows Info readers to set the encoding appropriately. 

     Local Variables:
     coding: enc
     End:

In HTML output, a `<meta>' tag is output, in the `<head>' section of the HTML, that specifies enc. Web servers and browsers cooperate to use this information so the correct encoding is used to display the page, if supported by the system. 

     <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
          charset=enc">

In all other cases, it is recognized but ignored.