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From: andy@ist.UUCP (Andy Greener)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: troff indexes
Message-ID: <1434@ist.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 7-Aug-87 16:17:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: ist.1434
Posted: Fri Aug  7 16:17:58 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 12-Aug-87 05:00:57 EDT
References: <MV5siey00Vs6c7E0Nt@andrew.cmu.edu>
Organization: Imperial Software Technology, London
Lines: 36
Summary: ditroff index generation

In article <MV5siey00Vs6c7E0Nt@andrew.cmu.edu>, ao06+@andrew.cmu.edu (Ayami Ogura) writes:
> 
> Has anybody out there ever created an index with troff?  Or had success using
> the ptx program?

I wrote a filter a while back to post process ditroff output to generate
a list of words and page numbers, and optionally the original font
as specified in the input text. This can then be further massaged
as you please to generate an index. Doing it this way gets you the
actual page number for each word, and includes words from pic input,
tables, etc. It is also independent of any particular macro package.

However, the technical author for whom I did this felt that this
approach generated very "noisy" indexes, even when we went to the
trouble of "intelligently" filtering this output to concatenate words
into phrases and suppress common words. He finally opted for marked-up
index entries appearing explicitly in the input text along with
keywords from titles, glossary entries, etc (this was in a home-grown
macro package so I had control over these things).

I tend to agree with him. Its very difficult, if not impossible, to
generate a useful index totally automatically, but it's helpful
if you've got some automated support.

Thus the indexing filter lies unused somewhere in my archives, but if
anyone desperately wants it I expect I could revive it.

	Andy Greener			Imperial Software Technology
					London, England.

					andy@ist.co.uk
					..mcvax!ukc!ist!andy

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