Re: indexing

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* John Fleck (jfleck@inkstain.net) wrote at 22:56 on 29/07/00:
> Folks -
> What decisions, if any, have been made about the technical side of
> indexing, and how Nautilus will handle it?
> 
> I assume we will use standard docbook indexing tags. Will Nautilus
> then harvest all those and build one grand, all-inclusive index of
> the GNOME docs installed on my computer?
> 
> Will it similarly build document-by-document indexes?
> 
> Or has none of this been decided yet?

Heh - it is interesting that you mention this because there has been recent
discussion on this.

There seems to be some confusion on the terms used (well I'm confused). Here
is what I see in the docs:

1) Index - i.e. Table of Contents thing

2) Glossary - List of terms (for easy searching of the docs).


Currently indexes work I believe - I mean, my application, glife, the first
help page/section/whatever-you-call-it has the Index. This makes sense - I
type 'help:glife' in Nautilus, I get the index of my document :) Sweet.

I am opposed to a grande all-inclusive index of all docs. This makes no sense
to me and seems un-intuitive. Unless can somebody come up with a convincing
argument for this, I will not do it. I'd rather concentrate on other better
features.

Oh wait - I just looked at gnome-db2html2 - It seems that it automatically
creates an 'index' of the document (at least with glife.sgml). Pretty neat
huh? ;) (everybody thank jrb!) - To try it out do a 'help:/path/to/file.sgml'
in Nautilus - or from the console:
'gnome-db2html2 <sgmlfile> &> index.html'
then view index.html with your favorite browser.

There is no need to 'build' indexes since it is generated on the fly by
gnome-db2html2

As for the 'glossary' is there a way to mark items/words to be included in
this glossary? A glossary seems to be the most ideal way of doing searches
We would need a specialized tool in medusa to do this though, but this
shouldn't be too difficult. It would build a database of these glossary terms,
and point you to the appropriate help file when you search for the glossary
item.

Another possibility is a 'word search'. medusa (in Nautilus) has the
capability of doing this for all files right now - it would need some tweaking
though to make it work specifically with help files (i.e. you need to limit
the search directory to /usr/share/gnome/help (only include .sgml files)) -
but that might not be so good cos it would include tags. Oh well - I don't
consider this 'essential' ;)

Any more 'advanced' forms of searching are beyond the scope of the help system
(until OMF is more mature)

Regards,
Ali