LaTeX error when building a file from xindy documentation

[Karl Berry]

    turns out the file alphabets-inc.tex contains a control character
    <CTRL-L>enc{T2A} in place of \ienc{T2A}

That's because the LaTeX command being output is \fenc, and
echo '\fenc' was being used in the Makefile to write it, and
echo '\f' is not portable. On your shell (zsh I imagine) it outputs a
form feed instead of the literal \f.

I changed the Makefile[.am,.in] to use printf to write that line,
splitting up the backslash and the f:
printf '\%s{T2A}\n' "fenc"
which seemed to work for me. r54168.

Fortunately there are no other \f (or \n or \r) sequences in echo
commands there, or anywhere in the source tree that I could
find. --best, karl.