Best way to create an index?

Best way to create an index?

[Herman Bruyninckx]

I have a (steadily growing) number of docbook manuals, but haven't
been able to generate an index for them. I have the 
<indexterm> ... </indexterm>
tags in the documents, but don't know how to process them :-)

Herman

-- 
  K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
<http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480

Re: Best way to create an index?

[Wookey]

+++ Herman Bruyninckx [03-11-17 20:04 +0100]:
> I have a (steadily growing) number of docbook manuals, but haven't
> been able to generate an index for them. I have the 
> <indexterm> ... </indexterm>
> tags in the documents, but don't know how to process them :-)

me too :-)

I managed to produce an index for the HTML versions of my docs (using
collateindex.pl) but never got it to work properly for the PDF versions. I
can generate an index but most of the page numbers don't get filled in and
many that do are wrong.

It seems that changing from SGML to XML toolchains is now deemed a good
idea. Does anyone know if this will improve the index-generation for printed
docs?

herman. The answer I was given to this question a couple of years ago was
'find a script called collateindex.pl and follow the instructions in it'. As
I say, this 'mostly' worked but not well enough to produce publishable (on
paper) indexes. Good docs on the subject seem remarkably hard to come by
given what a common problem it must be.

Wookey
-- 
Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK  Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679
work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/     play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/

Re: Best way to create an index?

[Bob Stayton]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 01:16:07PM +0000, Wookey wrote:
> +++ Herman Bruyninckx [03-11-17 20:04 +0100]:
> > I have a (steadily growing) number of docbook manuals, but haven't
> > been able to generate an index for them. I have the 
> > <indexterm> ... </indexterm>
> > tags in the documents, but don't know how to process them :-)
> 
> me too :-)
> 
> I managed to produce an index for the HTML versions of my docs (using
> collateindex.pl) but never got it to work properly for the PDF versions. I
> can generate an index but most of the page numbers don't get filled in and
> many that do are wrong.
> 
> It seems that changing from SGML to XML toolchains is now deemed a good
> idea. Does anyone know if this will improve the index-generation for printed
> docs?

If you process your XML with the DSSSL tools, then you
still must use the collateindex.pl step.  If you use
the XSL stylesheets and tools, then the stylesheet will
generate the index automatically if you have an empty
<index/> element in your document.  I consider that
a big improvement.  However, the current version of FOP,
the major free FO processor, does not know how to
collapse duplicate page references and page ranges in
an index.  The XEP processor can do that, though.

-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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