6.3.4 @node Line Requirements

Here are several requirements for @node lines:

• All the node names for a single Info file must be unique.

  Duplicates confuse the Info movement commands. This means, for example, that if you end every chapter with a summary, you must name each summary node differently. You cannot just call each one “Summary”. You may, however, duplicate the titles of chapters, sections, and the like. Thus you can end each chapter in a book with a section called “Summary”, so long as the node names for those sections are all different.

• A pointer name must be the name of a node.

  The node to which a pointer points may come before or after the node containing the pointer.

• @-commands in node names are not allowed. This includes punctuation characters that are escaped with a ‘@’, such as @ and {, and accent commands such as ‘@'’. (For a few cases when this is useful, Texinfo has limited support for using @-commands in node names; see Pointer Validation.) Perhaps this limitation will be removed some day.
• 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.

  For example, the following is a section title in this manual:

  @code{@@unnumberedsec}, @code{@@appendixsec}, @code{@@heading}

  But the corresponding node name lacks the commas and the @'s:

  unnumberedsec appendixsec heading

• Case is significant in node names.

  Spaces before and after names on the ‘@node’ line are ignored, but spaces “inside” a name are significant. For example:

  @node foo bar, @node foo bar , @node foo bar ,

  all define the same node, ‘foo bar’. References to the node should all use that name, without the leading or trailing spaces, but with the internal spaces.