On Mon, Sep 28, 2026 at 10:39:36AM +0200, [email protected] wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2026 at 08:13:31AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > What about the @detailmenu used by large manuals? E.g., Emacs uses it
> > in 2 of its manuals. This menu includes all the nodes from the entire
> > manual, but the automatically-generated nodes will be absent from
> > there, won't they?
>
> No, they will be present, the addition of nodes for sectioning commands
> is done before the automatic generation of menu and detailmenu.
>
> > There's also the issue of stuff that can appear in section names, but
> > is not recommended for node names (colons, Texinfo commands, etc.).
>
> What needs to be protected in the Texinfo code is protected (comma,
> leading parenthesis, colons...), and in the generated Info, the node
> name is also quoted if needed. Texinfo commands are fine in node names.
I checked that texi2any issues appropriate warnings for automatically
generated node names. For example:
\input texinfo
@node Top
@top
in top.
@node One:
@chapter One:
AA.
@chapter Two:
AA.
@bye
Here warnings are issued both for the explicit node ("One:") and the implicit
node ("Two:").
$ ../tta/perl/texi2any.pl -c
TREE_TRANSFORMATIONS=insert_nodes_for_sectioning_commands shadow-node-name.texi
shadow-node-name.texi:8: warning: menu entry node name should not contain `:'
shadow-node-name.texi:14: warning: menu entry node name should not contain `:'
Hence the feature seems to work farily well with non-recommended
characters in node names.
I did find a possible bug with parentheses:
\input texinfo
@node Top
@top
in top.
@node One:
@chapter One:
AA.
@chapter (Two)
AA.
@bye
Here, "texi2any -c TREE_TRANSFORMATIONS=insert_nodes_for_sectioning_commands"
fails to issue a warning for the "(Two)" node, and the node name is output
in the menu in "Top" without any protection, as:
* (Two)::
This link then fails to work in "info".
With an explicit line "@node (Two)" preceding the @chapter line, I get a
hard error:
shadow-node-name.texi:13: syntax for an external node used for `(Two)'
However, you can still get output by wrapping the opening ( with @asis{...}:
@node @asis{(}Two)
Again, here texi2any produces a non-functional menu entry to "(Two)", without
issuing a warning.
This suggests the lack of a warning is not specific to
insert_nodes_for_sectioning_commands. The warning that does exist is probably
a syntax error of @node, not from a check of the resulting node name itself.
The correct output for a node name of "(Two)" would be for the node name to
be wrapped in DEL bytes in most contexts.
Similar use of @asis{...} to produce "forbidden" node names does lead to a
warning, as in "@node Two@asis{,}" (or "@chapter Two@asis{,}" with no @node),
so presumably the case of a node name beginning with what looks like an
external manual is just an omission from the node name validity checking.
