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Date:         Fri, 29 Jun 90 11:35:00 PDT
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
From: Don Hosek <DHOSEK@HMCVAX.bitnet>
Subject:      makeindex
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 148

Nelson Beebe's comments regarding makeindex which have appeared
on the tex-archive mailing list have prompted me to make a few
comments regarding this program:

(1) despite what Nelson says, makeindex should be in WEB.
Somewhere, while I was at Texas A&M I read a comment saying
"makindex is a fine program, but only runs on Unix since it was
written in C." Yes, that's incorrect, but it's a very common
perception. Non-WEB TeXware is generally conceived (in my
experiece) as being hacked and poorly documented.

(2) Speaking of documentation, well, um. Makeindex, as Nelson
distributes it, has three documents:
   _MakeIndex:_ An Index Processor for LaTeX (Leslie Lamport)
      LaTeX user documentation for MakeIndex. Supplied as a LaTeX
      file.
   Index Preparation and Processing (Pehong Chen and Michael A.
      Harrison) not really program documentation at all, more
      concerned with theoretical concerns. Supplied as a LaTeX
      file, and also as the PostScript output from the DVI
      processing.
   makeindex - a general purpose, formatter-independent index
      processor (apparently by Pehong Chen). This is the only
      documentation of the ist format. However, the options one
      has for the documentation formatting are: GNU infor format,
      Unix man page, nroff output, VMS help and PostScript output
      from troff. *no* TeX formatting, nor is their a plain text
      file version. No wonder I never figured this stuff out when
      I was at UIC on a CMS machine without PostScript printers.

(3) some design flaws: There should be a syntax for indicating
the ist file to be used in the idx file itself. I'm sure more
than one person has cursed the day Frank Mittelbach was born when
they tried typing something like
   latex array
   makeindex array
   latex array
and that's too bad since it isn't really Frank's fault (well,
maybe a little ;-) I'm not sure if this can be handled in a
formatter-independent way, but hey, let's make this feature
TeX/LaTeX bound if we have to... it is important.

-dh

P.S.  Somebody with time is desperately needed to reimplement
makindex as a WEB program. Any volunteers?