Re: indexing

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Sat, Jul 29, 2000 at 11:25:30PM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> 
> And if any of the people who volunteered or know anything about this would
> care to step forward and point me to some documentation on indexing, I'd be
> most appreciative.  I've not been able to find anything good, and I've
> noticed that the docs that the LDP has which do have some index markup
> (something like 4 of them), aren't really well done.  Thanks,
> 	Greg
> 

Greg -
There is a brief discussion of docbook indexing tags on Norman Walsh's
web site:

http://nwalsh.com/docbook/dsssl/doc/indexing.html

It also explains how to automatically build an index from marked-up
sgml using a perl script called collateindex.pl.

The script is the cygnus stylesheets package:
ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com:/pub/docbook-tools/docware/SOURCES/
stylesheets.tgz

I've just been playing with it a bit this afternoon, and it seems
rather cumbersome - not really practical for production work. Building
an index is a multiple-step process, and I've had to use jade directly
to make it work rather than db2html. Also, it seems to link to the
beginning of the section rather than the spot where your indexterm
occurs. 

But it does offer a way to build an index to see how it
looks at the end of your document.

Cheers,
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck@inkstain.net (h)
jfleck@abqjournal.com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/