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From: jon@gaia.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Indexing in TeX?
Message-ID: <271@gaia.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Jan-87 19:39:42 EST
Article-I.D.: gaia.271
Posted: Wed Jan 28 19:39:42 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Jan-87 04:05:36 EST
References: <13@blipyramid.BLI.COM>
Reply-To: jon@gaia.UUCP (Jonathan Corbet)
Organization: Gaia Corp., Boulder, CO
Lines: 22
Keywords: tex, troff, index

mao@blipyramid.BLI.COM (Mike Olson):
> does tex make any provision for the
>generation of a sorted index of terms?

Generating indexes in TeX is a royal pain.  Knuth doesn't like automatic
index generation.  Somewhere deep in the TeXbook, he talks about how he likes
to do them by hand, after the book is done.  He claims it helps him produce
good indexes.  Having spent massive amounts of time trying to find things
in the TeXbook, I disagree with him.

RMS put together a nice index package that he used to typeset the GNU
emacs manual.  The process that one ends up with is (1) run TeX, generating
a raw index file, (2) run "texindex" on that file, which sorts the entries,
and puts multiple entries together, and (3) run TeX again with the sorted
file.

There is also apparently an index scheme in the first issue of TUGboat, but
I haven't seen it.

-- 
Jonathan Corbet
{hao | nbires}!gaia!jon