Re: Colon in index items

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 12:11:08 -0500
> From: address@hidden (Karl Berry)
> 
>     Two colons in a row signal the end of the menu item and the beginning of 
>     text that the reader ignores.  If you can have two colons as part of the 
>     entry itself, how do you tell which one is the ``real'' end?
> 
> Ah. I think I see what's going on.
> 
> Ordinary menus in a manual have entries that generally look like
> * Foo::   Some description.
> where Foo is both the menu item label and the node name.
> Indeed, clearly these cannot be disambiguated without quoting the Foo.

Exactly: an index is just a large menu, as far as the reader is
concerned.  In addition, IIRC, even cross-references are handled with
almost exactly the same code as the one used for menus (at least
that's so in the stand-alone reader).  So any changes in the way we
isolate the node name from a menu entry should also work in
cross-references.  Either that, or we will have to add special code
to handle just the indices.

> However, index entries use the otherwise-uncommon form of menu item
> * Label: Nodename.
> where the label is given separately from the node.
> I think these *can* be disambiguated by the regexp I gave before.

Yes, provided that we make indices be handled by a special code.

> Whether it's worth it is another matter, since it doesn't solve the
> problem in general.

I agree.  I feel that any such solution would be very fragile, and so
we should try to find something more solid.