[scribus-dev] Design for indexing feature.

[ale rimoldi]

hi john

> A spec was requested. I provided my ideas of how
> to provide a new indexing system with minimum
> effort and maximum accuracy using the TeX program
> makeindex as the processing engine. My paper is
> published here:
> http://wexfordpress.com/phase2.pdf
> 
> I would appreciate it if the developers would
> read it and tell me if it is usable as a spec for
> the purpose intended. I don't program in C++ and
> in any case I don't have a roadmap to the Scribus
> program code. So this is the best I can do.

thanks for your proposal!

if i understand you correctly, you're suggesting that we should use the
tex/latex indexing system from scribus.

personally, i'd prefer a solution that -- while possibly using external
libraries -- does not pull in a huge package like latex...
but for the time being, going through latex could also be a way of
doing (in the future we could have a simpler internal index or an
external one through latex)

so, back to your proposal!

while i'm comfortable with latex, i must admit that i have never used
its indexing system... so, i might not understand some details...

let's try to split the proposal in three phases:

- marking the words that are to be indexed

- creating an idx file that can be fed into makeindex

- getting the result into scribus and format it as wished by the user.



a. marking the words to be indexed

as i understand it, if the user wants to add a word to the index -- the
"dog" appearing on page 32 -- he has to get scribus to change "dog"
into "\indexentry{dog}{32}"

we probably don't want to put the code as is in the text frame
(scribus being strongly wysiwyg...) but there are a few a ways to
achieve that!
as an example, we could have a "show fields" mode or could be showing
the codes in a separate window.

we certainly want scribus to automatically fill and update the page
number.

and we will have to store each index in the .sla.


b. creating an idx file

you seem to suggest that scribus should keep an idx file in sync with
the .sla.

i don't think that tex/latex is doing it, and i don't think that
scribus should, either.
the idx file should be created on the fly when the index is created or
updated.

it will probably be slow, but does it really matter?
for sure, if we use latex, we probably will not want to update the
index each time a page is refreshed!

concerning the creation of the idx itself, we will have to check a way
that makes sure that the page breaks are the same in the file fed into
makeindex and in the .sla... but this should not be way too complicated
to achieve.

c. getting the index into scribus

i have not looked into the output of makeindex but i expect a well
structured file that is fairly easy to parse.
i'm not too worried about that...




so, using manual edited marks and latex's makeindex for indexing looks
like something doable, but not trivial...

in my eyes the biggest issue being the way we can mark the entries.



john, did i understand your proposal correctly? any further thoughts?

ciao
a.l.e