Re: Invisible colons in Emacs Info.

[karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry)]

    ;;  - a menu item MAY contain colons but not colon-space ": "
    ;;  - a menu item ending with ": " (but not ":: ") is an index entry
    ;;  - a node name MAY NOT contain a colon

Sigh, this is so confusing.

What does `menu item' mean?  Because the Emacs manual, for example,
contains many menu items like this:
basic.texi:24:* Files: Basic Files.   Visiting, creating, and saving files.

That's a menu item with colon-space in it, and we certainly can't
declare it invalid.  Does it still work with the current code?

I assume it does, and what `menu item' means is `menu entry name', as in
the canonical example:
* menu entry name: Node name.   A short description.

    ;; This distinction is to support indexing of computer programming
    ;; language terms that may contain ":" but not ": ".

Obviously we want to support this, but it seems to me the best way to do
it is by introducing a real quoting syntax instead of putting more
restrictions on menu item syntax.  (Which will then allow us
support lots of other good things, like : and . in node names after
all.)  But see below ...

    I thought I understood from previous messages that you "agreed to
    disagree" with people who held the views expressed above.  (Or am I
    completely misunderstanding things?)

No, you're not misunderstanding, that's basically what I said before,
but then it sounded like a lot more things were becoming invalid than I
thought before.

I'm still not completely clear on it, but it seems now that the only
thing that is becoming invalid is your example of

* menu entry name:node name.
(with zero spaces after the menu entry name:).

Upon reflection, I guess that seems ok to me. I just checked all the
Texinfo source files on my system and the only ones which would fail are
all part of XEmacs (lookup-guide.tex, lookup.texi, and sml-mode.texi),
which have entries like this:
/usr/share/xemacs/mule-packages/man/lookup/lookup.texi:* ndeb+/cdrom:WAEI    ^[$BOB1Q<-E5^[(B             =<>
/usr/share/xemacs/xemacs-packages/man/sml-mode/sml-mode.texi:* sml:(sml-mode).  Emacs mode for editing SML

I guess I should implement a warning (at least) in makeinfo for this,
and document it in the manual.  It would be good to implement it in
standalone Info too, of course, but that is not as important to me.

The other thing I agreed to was that makeinfo will always output at
least one space between `menu entry name:' and `node name.' in indexes.
That's no problem and is already the case.