Paragraph breaks

Subject: Paragraph breaks
From: Norman Walsh <norm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 17:37:32 -0400
I'm not sure that's an exactly descriptive subject, but let's muddle on.

I decided to look into getting automatic indexing into the DocBook 
style sheet.  I'm not sure I'm even approaching this in a reasonable
manner, but here goes.

Imagine that I've collected all the index terms together into a 
node list.  Imagine further that I've got them sorted correctly:

<indexterm><primary>foo</primary></indexterm>
<indexterm><primary>foo</primary></indexterm>
<indexterm><primary>foo</primary><secondary>bar</></indexterm>

Now I process the list of index terms sequentially.  For the first
indexterm, I output

  foo, 000

(where 000 is what Word thinks the xref is before you resolve
it.  actually, that doesn't work either right now, but that's a
different bug ;-).

For the second index term, I notice that they are the same, and
output only

  , 000

For the third index term, I see that the primary is the same and
I output

      bar, 000

Now, can anyone see how to do this so that I'll get

  foo, 000, 000
     bar, 000

If I use (make paragraph) for the terms, then I get

  foo, 000
  , 000
     bar, 000

because the "foo, 000" paragraph ends.  And if I use (make sequence),
I don't see how to get the appropriate line breaks and indentation.

Suggestions?

--norm

P.S. I suppose it's possible to imagine building nested lists so that
you collect together all the terms that have the same primary and output
them in one paragraph, then nested within that list you have a list of
all the terms that have common secondaries and output them as one
paragraph, etc.  But that would require far more list manipulation
in scheme that I feel entirely comfortable with at this late hour.
It took me long enough to figure out how to get (loop) working so that
I'd be able to read the list sequentially ;-)


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