Re: dot in node not accepted in Info in menu entry

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 12:03:49AM -0400, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > If this is so, it should certainly be clearer in the manual, either
> > in the part about menus, or at least in the Info format
> > specification part of the manual (I could propose a documentation
> > patch, in case this is the issue).
> 
> This is already documented:
> 
>    * Unfortunately, you cannot use periods, commas, colons or
>      parentheses within a node name; these confuse the Texinfo
>      processors.  Perhaps this limitation will be removed some day, too.

That's not good enough, in my opinion.  For one thing, punctuation signs
do not confuse the Texinfo processors per se, this is rather a limitation 
of the Info language.  In Texinfo you can use anything within a node 
provided you escape them properly (a comma by @comma, other punctuation 
in @asis, for example).  At least it is so with texi2any.

The real issue is with Info, but I think that we can be more precise 
than this list.  For instance, in the node header (the line like

  File: c.info,  Node: Top,  Next: c.  d,  Up: (dir)

the only issue should be a comma.  We can come with something more 
precise, and to overcome those Info language limitations, it is 
useful to know which are intrinsic limitations of the language and 
which are due to the implementation of reader and may be changed in 
the reader.  This allows to have more cases handled right, even without
changes in the Info format, and also give ideas of what should be
changed in the Info format to remove this limitation, not today, but
maybe tomorrow (and not some day :-).

-- 
Pat