Request For Clarification: Indexterm processing in auto-index generation.

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld@sympatico.ca>]

Hi there,

earlier this year I asked about the expected and 'correct' behavior for 
index generation in HTML and pdf, as I found (find) the current behavior 
surprising.

Bob Stayton pointed me to this explanation:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/IndexOutput.html

"Instead of page numbers (which do not exist in HTML), each link shows 
the title of the section that contained the indexterm. That gives the 
reader some context for the link.

...

The links go to the top of the section rather than to the anchor point 
within the section. That's done to permit multiple identical indexterms 
in the same section to collapse to a single entry. That's done to avoid 
having to repeat the section title."

while I had read in "DocBook: The Definitive Guide":


http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/indexterm.html


"IndexTerms identify text that is to be placed in the index. In the 
simplest case, the placement of the IndexTerm in the document identifies 
the location of the term in the text. In other words, the IndexTerm is 
placed in the flow of the document at the point where the IndexEntry in 
the Index should point. In other cases, attributes on IndexTerm are used 
to identify the location of the term in the text."


I still find these two texts to contradict each other. I do find the 
suggested processing expectation from TDG much more intuitive than the 
one explained in "DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide".

At least, I'd appreciate if those two texts could be made to agree on 
what the expected processing should be like. :-)

Thanks a lot,
		Stefan

-- 

       ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...