On Tuesday 16 November 2010 13:00:57 Craig Bradney wrote: > On 11/16/10 4:13 PM, John Culleton wrote:
> > I have started working on indexing... started prototyping some > changes.. no ETA. > > Craig For veteran programmers ETA is always RSN :<) The bull work of sorting, summarizing and formatting an index can be done by the TeX program makeindex. You feed it two files, a list of raw index iterms with the suffix idx, and optionally a control file changing defaults, especially formatting details, with the suffix .ist. The output is expressed in an ascii file with the suffix .ind. The manual for using makeindex is not long. Mostly it deals with the options in the control file. Although makeindex is intended to accept the file .idx from a TeX program run, and feed the file .ist back into the next TeX run on the same book file I often use it for creating indexes that will be fed into another typesetting program. For this purpose I use the control file alpha.ist listed below: -------------------------- preamble "" postamble "" setpage_prefix "" setpage_suffix "" group_skip "\n\n\n" headings_flag 1 heading_prefix " --" heading_suffix "--\n\n" item_0 "\n " item_1 "\n~ " item_2 "\n~~ " item_01 "\n\n~ " item_x1 "\n\n~ " item_12 "\n~~ " item_x2 "\n~~ " delim_t "\n" -------------------------- To translate the above gobbledygook you have to read the makeindex manual available here: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/indexing/makeindex/doc/ In my own stand-alone indexing program tyro.tcl I call makeindex after each index term is added. Clumsy I know, but with modern high speed computers the delay is negligible. Here are the files which make tyro intelligible: http://wexfordpress.com/tex/tyro.pdf http://wexfordpress.com/tex/tyro.tcl http://wexfordpress.com/tex/alpha.ist. Have a look. John Culleton
