Re: warning for index entry with :

[Karl Berry]

    My preference would be keep the warning as is until there is a way
    to escape all the characters that cannot be in node names.

BTW, my thought on this has been to do something like this:

address@hidden address@hidden

I.e., same basic syntax as the image and index directives.  The
arbitrary chars would use some escape syntax, maybe _XXXX as in html
xrefs, to avoid the problematic characters (comma, colon, etc.) from
occurring literally.

In any case, we should only use the new convention in cases where the
name was disallowed before, so that Info files keep working with older
viewers as well as they do now.

Of course the viewers will have to understand it in order for the user
to see something comprehensible.

Oh, I guess there is one new complication, --plaintext output.
Evidently we currently ignore @image with --plaintext (which seems
potentially wrong, shouldn't we output the alt text if it's present?),
but we can't just ignore node names and the like.  Since for plain text
there is no need for things to be machine-parsable, I guess we can just
output the commas and colons as themselves?

I also have no idea how (im)possible it will be to handle this in
texinfo.tex, haven't systematically tried the possibilities.

I doubt we want to do all this for the upcoming release, we're making
enough major changes, already, but just getting it on record.  wdyt?

k