Re: colon in indices

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Sat, 9 Mar 2002, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > 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).
> 
> No, I really suggest that if you press `:', you get and see `<colon>'.

IMHO, this will be _highly_ confusing.  A user who typed "i :" will want 
to see a literal colon in the echo area; she has no way of knowing that 
the author of Texinfo used remapping.

> This is similar to seeing `<prior>' while pressing the PgUp key in
> Emacs.

<prior> is actually a label printed on that key on some types of 
keyboards.  While the PgUp issue is complicated by the fact that 
different keyboards label it with different text, the colon has no such 
strings attached, so we shouldn't introduce such confusion, IMHO.

> > Also, the mappings should be somehow made known to the Info reader,
> > if we indeed make it open-ended like you suggest.
> 
> What about a small extension to the info file format, which could
> recognize at the very beginning something like the following section:

It's a pain to introduce such extensions into the Info format.