Re: Invisible colons in Emacs Info.

[Luc Teirlinck]

We probably need a decision on the following issue:

It seems that the current de facto situation for menu subtopic names
is the following:

1.  They can contain colons, but not colons followed by a space.
2.  There must be at least one space separating the subtopic name and
    the node name.

If this is considered OK, then nothing needs to be done.  

Some, like Karl, would prefer not to allow colons at all until a new
syntax for quoting node names is introduced in Texinfo.  That would
also be easy, one would just have to revert earlier changes.

Stefan and Karl pointed out that condition 2 used not to be
necessary.  There seems to be some doubt as to whether its
introduction was deliberate or accidental.

If we want 1.  but not 2. then things become much more complicated and
precise specs would need to be agreed upon.

Quoting Stefan, who proposed an (if I understand correctly) admittedly
non-ideal patch:

   Problem is that it still fails on:

      * name1:foo:node.           des:cription.

   because it thinks the menu entry name is "name1:foo:node.           des"
   and the node name is "cription".  I'm sure we can tune the disambiguation
   by saying that menu entries can have `:' but cannot have `.' after the `:'
   or some other such heuristic.  If anybody wants to spice up the
   Info-menu-entry-name-re regexp accordingly...
   We really need a better solution.

Sincerely,

Luc.