Re: Colon in index items

[Karl Berry]

    Why so?  If you want to really support colon in a menu item name, I
    agree that requires change in the format.  But maybe there is a way
    to get reasonably good results without changing the format, by
    writing something different into the index.

There has been a proposal to (automatically) use <colon> instead of :.
This cure seems worse than the disease to me.

There's basically no excuse for Texinfo not allowing any characters in
index entries and node names, it causes continual nagging confusion and
annoyance.

The best idea we (mainly Eli :) had was to use null characters, so that
node names/index entries in info files would be, say, 
address@hidden@address@hidden@ (only
if the name contains a : or other problematic character only).  At least
such characters may be invisible when displayed, sometimes.  And it
seemed perhaps easier to deal with in the Info readers than other
escape mechanisms.

Eli, am I remembering right?

rms, if you have other ideas for dealing with the problem, we'd like to
hear them ...

Thanks,
karl