texinfo: Menu Location

Menus

Writing a Menu

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7.1 Menu Location
=================

There may be at most one menu in a node.  A menu is conventionally
located at the end of a node, without any regular text or additional
commands between the '@end menu' and the beginning of the next node.

  This convention is useful, since a reader who uses the menu could
easily miss any such text.  Also, any such post-menu text will be
considered part of the menu in Info output (which has no marker for the
end of a menu).  Thus, a line beginning with '* ' will likely be
incorrectly handled.

  Technically, menus can carry you to any node, regardless of the
structure of the document; even to nodes in a different Info file.
However, we do not recommend making use of this, because it is hard for
readers to follow.  Also, the 'makeinfo' implicit pointer creation
feature (Note: makeinfo Pointer Creation) and GNU Emacs Texinfo mode
updating commands work only to create menus of subordinate nodes in a
hierarchically structured document.  It is much better to use cross
references to refer to arbitrary nodes.

  In the past, we recommended using an '@heading' command within an
'@ifinfo' conditional instead of the normal sectioning commands after a
very short node with a menu.  This had the advantage of making the
printed output look better, because there was no very short text between
two headings on the page.  But this also does not work with 'makeinfo''s
implicit pointer creation, and it also makes the XML output incorrect,
since it does not reflect the true document structure.  So, we no longer
recommend this.