@noindent
The @sc{car}, @var{item-string}, is the string to be displayed in the
menu. It should be short---preferably one to three words. It should
-describe the action of the command it corresponds to.
+describe the action of the command it corresponds to. Note that it is
+not generally possible to display non-ASCII text in menus. It will
+work for keyboard menus and will work to a large extent when Emacs is
+built with Gtk+ support.@footnote{In this case, the text is first
+encoded using the @code{utf-8} coding system and then rendered by the
+toolkit as it sees fit.}
You can also supply a second string, called the help string, as follows: