[Scribus] Index generation ala LaTeX

[John R. Culleton]

On Tuesday 07 February 2006 04:36 am, Tobias Hilbricht wrote:
> Am Montag, 6. Februar 2006 19:45 schrieb John R. Culleton:
> > 3. In the Gvim editor I convert all the page break characters ^L to
> > the string \vfil\eject ( I use plain text, not LaTeX.)
>
> Has the use of plain TeX rather than LaTeX a particular reason? You stress
> this point, so I got interested.
>
> Yours sincerely
>
> Tobias Hilbricht

Mostly just personal preference. But plain TeX has in general
less fuss and feathers than LaTeX and the eplain.tex macros
refine the indexing process somewhat. There are tags that both
print and index the operand, e.g. \idx{indexitem} and a silent
form \sidx{indexitem} that just indexes it. There is a form that handles a
proper name properly, such as \idxname{John}{Culleton} which
prints surname last but indexes with surname first. 

There are facilities for changing the sort
order, to that the items
Poodle
   toy   32
   miniature  34
   standard   42
coould appear in that order which is logical rather than
alphabetical.

By the by I referred to foo.idx as a parameter file. The correct
suffix is foo.ist of course. This file allows you to control the
format etc. of both the input and the output. The input file for
makeindex is e.g., foo.idx and the output is e.g., foo.ind. One
can have multiple indexes generated on the same pass, the first
foo.idx, the second foo.jdx, the third foo.kdx and so on. 

Someone suggested not using the existing tex-based indexing tags.
I don't think it is necessary to reinvent the wheel. There is
some degree of flexibilty in prefixes for the input to makeindex, 
but change for change's sake seems unnecessary labor. 

If the needs of e.g, Czech language loom large then the makeindex
replacement Xindy could be considered. But this is written in an
uncommon language (Lisp or something) and is not 
in wide use. But those curous about that bypath can google under
Xindy. There is a mailing list. 

I can serve as a resource person in re the use of eplain and
makeindex. 

-- 
John Culleton