Re: Paragraph breaks

[James Robertson <jamesr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 14:10 30/07/97 +0200, you wrote:

  | > If two, indentical index terms occur on the same page, any code
  | > that generates an index will be bound to produce the page number
  | > twice:
  | > 
  | >   foo, 3, 5, 5, 8
  | > 
  | > There's no way for the DSSSL code to know that both references
  | > occur on the same page.
  | 
  | I have spent some thought on how index processing might be done in
  | DSSSL and looked through the standard for suitable mechanisms, 
  | but the closest I got was that this kind of post-processing of
  | generated text might be exactly what general-indirect-sosofo is for,
  | but since jade does not implement it, I could not verify this through
  | experiments.
  | 
  | Perhaps general-indirect-sosofo and friends could be implemented using
  | a two-pass approach like latex does, ie have the formatting engine
  | write out the generated text to an auxiliary file and take the information
  | from there in a second run. But I don't know if this is a good idea since
  | it would make the result of the processing depend on the number of
  | previous passes. One could overcome this by having the tex backend call
  | tex (twice) and produce dvi instead of tex. 

It's been a very long time since I've done TeX work, although I used
to be reasonably knowledgable. From my hazy recollections, don't you mark
the words to be indexed in the text itself, and then run a TeX routine
to automatically build the index. You then specify formatting options
regarding things like: indending, combining references on the same page,
converting sequential numbers to ranges, etc.

So in the case of TeX, for example, wouldn't it be easier to use this
mechanism, instead of trying to generate the index directly?

Just my $0.02,

J

-------------------------
James Robertson
Step Two Designs
Newton & SGML Consultancy
jamesr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Beyond the Idea"

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