> From: Gavin Smith <[email protected]> > Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2026 11:36:50 +0100 > Cc: [email protected] > > > And what is the reason for this special formatting? why cannot the > > menus in Index nodes use the same conventions as in other menus? > > The point was to avoid using the DEL quoting mechanism when it was not > necessary. It would allow you to have an index entry (from my email above): > > * a::b: a colon b. (line 129) > > With the DEL quoting, this would become > > * ^?a::b^?: a colon b. (line 129) > > As I found in my email above, Emacs Info already had some limited support > for colons in index entries: > > The Emacs Info mode supports single colons in index entries as long as > they are not followed by a space. > > Not quoting the index text would allow this support to continue. If we'd > started output quoting entries, so that the following: > > * c:d: EEEE. (line 129) > > became > > * ^?c:d^?: EEEE. (line 129) > > - this would have broken such entries with Emacs Info mode.
Emacs that doesn't support quoted node names cannot be expected to work with manuals where node names use colons. It doesn't work anywhere else: neither in menus nor in cross-references. So why is it important to let it work in Index nodes?? > Basically, support for this depends on using special code for reading index > entries, rather than that used for other menu entries. Which is why it's bad. Emacs uses regular expressions to recognize and parse node references, and regular expressions are not well suited for "special cases" like this one. > We could change the Info browser to support quoted index text, but there > wouldn't be any immediate reason to make texi2any output such quoted text. > The only reason would be if Emacs Info mode recognised the quoted index > text but didn't recognise unquoted index text containing a colon. Which is exactly what happens in my Emacs, where the quoted node names are already supported in all the other places. Now I have to go back to the Index code and redo it. Ugh!
