Re: Invisible colons in Emacs Info.

[karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)]

    In nornal menus, things look like:
            * menu:entry.		description.

    whereas in indices, the description is missing and things look like:
            * menu:			entry.

Indexes are completely normal menus.  There is nothing to stop a user
from doing something like
@menu
* Foo:          bar.
@end menu

    * menu:entry.                description.
    will yield an error.

That's a bug.  There can be any number of spaces after the colon
in the menu:entry form, including zero.

    support colons in the middle of menu subtopic names.

That just can't be done right now.  A new syntax for quoting node names
has to be introduced to fix it, kludging with whitespace won't solve the
problem.  As we've discussed before.  This won't be happening for Emacs 21.4.

    blame me if you disagree) very much want to support entries like:
    * menu:entry:  entry.       description.

To what end?  I mean, what are the real examples that are hoped to be
supported?  This is new Info syntax, as far as I know.  If makeinfo
doesn't complain about it, it probably should.

I don't understand even this skeletal example.  Surely the point here is
not to repeat the node name `entry', that wouldn't be useful.  

As far as I know, there are exactly two valid menu formats.  From the
Menu Example node in the Texinfo manual:

    @menu
    * menu entry name: Node name.   A short description.
    * Node name::                   This form is preferred.
    @end menu

  This produces:

    * menu:

    * menu entry name: Node name.   A short description.
    * Node name::                   This form is preferred.

That's it.  It covers regular menus, indexes, and dir entries.  All have
the same syntax.  You can't just randomly decide to do new stuff with
colons, periods, parens, etc. in menu entries without breaking many
existing documents/installations.