Re: Colons in indices

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 11 Apr 2001, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:

> what happens if you'd skip it as long as it's
> embedded between non-space, ie:
> 
>    Foo::bar: x
>       ^^    ^
>      skip   end

Well, first, "*Note Foo::" is a cross-reference to a node "Foo", and
it is normally followed by a non-space, as in "*Note Foo::, for more
details."  So, non-whitespace is not enough, we will have to exclude
punctuation as well (`.' and `,' at the very least, more if we want to
avoid breaking semi-correct but working Info files).

And second, the current Info format doesn't preclude a menu entry like
this:

 * Introduction::What is termcap? Why this manual?

This is actually copied from a termcap manual, albeit an old one.  I
don't know if it's okay to break such manuals.  (I didn't check all of
them, so I don't know whether any current manuals still use such menu
entries.)

But I believe the original problem was with node names like "Foo:bar",
not "Foo::bar".  The former presents a different problem, because Info
currently takes "Foo:bar" followed by some punctuation as a reference
to a node named "bar".  And Info will take any string, no matter how
long, after the initial colon, provided that it ends with a period.
Although I couldn't find any Info files on my machine that actually
has such an occurence, they all have whitespace after the colon, as in
"Foo: bar.".