Re: Indices in Info.

[karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)]

    > * $Id::                                  GNU Sample Texts.

I removed the :'s from these index entries in texinfo.txi.

    "Emacs should be able to handle this correctly" 

Yes it should.  Regardless of the (newline) example (see below),
consider this index entry:
@cindex (dir) as Up node of Top node

Here, the parentheses are meaningful and correct.  I could also imagine
wanting to index ( in a programming language manual.  I'm sure there are
other index entries that start with ( out there as well, since it's
always been allowed.

    or "starting an index entry with a parenthetical remark makes no sense"?  
    In this particular instance, it definitely would
    seem more logical to have entries named "newline", "space" and "tab",

This is in the command index.  The manual is not talking about a command
@newline.  It's talking about @<the-newline-character>.  That's why I
put the parentheses in.  I suppose angle brackets instead of parentheses
might be slightly better.  I changed it.

But that's irrelevant to the question of whether index entries can start
with (.  They should be able to.  And the leading parentheses work in
Emacs 21.3, at least they do for me.  So perhaps this got broken in the
current source code ...

    IMHO, these tricky cases should be solved by a change in the Info file
    format

Yes, I agree, as we've discussed before.  We shouldn't make complicated
rules about when colons are acceptable and when they're not, according
to the regexp du jour.  Instead, we should just support everything.

Until that glorious day arrives, I'm not worried about discrepancies
between emacs-info and standalone-info in this regard.  I don't see any
need to document exactly which cases work and which don't in which
reader, since it all changes from version to version anyway.

Thanks,
karl