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Message-ID:  <199701302009.VAA27182@daimi.aau.dk>
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              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Thu, 30 Jan 1997 21:09:49 +0100
From: Soren Sandmann Pedersen <sandmann@DAIMI.AAU.DK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Index generation
Status: R

According to The Companion, indices should be generated with the MakeIndex
program. This is fine as long as one is writing English (and German?) texts;
for other languages, however, the sorting mechanism does not work
properly, since it does not take into account the language-specifik
characters.

This made me wonder if the index generation could be generated by (La)TeX
itself. Are there any reasons why it couldn't?

Index generation within LaTeX would perhaps be slow, but it a number of
advantages would be gained:

    - The appearence of the index could be determined from the class,
      keeping with one of the goals of LaTeX.

    - The language-specific details such as special characters and sort
      orderering could be taken care of automatically.

    - It would not be necessary to depend on the extra program MakeIndex.

The speed would of course be a problem; but a user could wait
until he or she produces the final version of the document to produce
the index. It would also be possible to generate an index in draft mode
in which the entries were only partially solved (e.g., only sorted by
first letter).

I would like to hear some opinions on this matter, as I might start
writing an experimental package.

Soeren Sandmann

--
Soeren Sandmann

e-mail: sandmann@daimi.aau.dk