Re: colon in indices

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2002 07:15:20 +0100 (CET)
> 
>   If I now press `i :', info should handle this as `i <colon>'

That's an interesting idea, but it will require changes in display
code, in addition to the index-searching commands (because you will
want the user to see a `:', not a "<colon>", when the index entry is
displayed, like when I look through the Index node manually, or when
the index entry is echoed in the echo area).

Also, the mappings should be somehow made known to the Info reader,
if we indeed make it open-ended like you suggest.  That's a tough
requirement, since the Info format doesn't currently have any way to
convey such meta-textual information, the only exception being the
tag tables.

We could, of course, overcome this latetr difficulty if we allow only
some specific characters to be encoded like that.  The list of
characters which interfere with menus is quite short, so it should be
possible to have directives like @colon, @period, etc., and teach
Info only about those few.

Several alternative ideas were considered, which mostly involved using
a different delimiter (some control character) in menu entries and
xref's, which will then make the colon free to be interpreted as a
normal character.  Unfortunately, no one has coded that yet.