Re: DOCBOOK: comprehensive indexing

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc@cu-portland.edu> was heard to say:
| document containing part numbers, and I'd like to generate a section at
| the end of my document that contains links back to EVERY part number
| that I've mentioned.  I've looked over Norm Walsh's book, but I'm still
| not clear on how this can be done.  Thanks in advance for
| pointer/advice,

What you're asking for is a very custom application. I can think of a
couple of ways to achieve what you want. But first, let's make sure I
understand your setup :-)

You have a bunch of documents that contain things like this:

  <para>Some text referring to a product number
  <productnumber>X-13-144</productnumber> that needs to be 
  indexed.</para>

When you process your document, you want to build an index (or
cross reference) of all product numbers.

Two possible solutions occur to me, off the top of my head:

1. Use the stylesheet. Write a custom stylesheet that finds all
   of the product numbers in your document and "does the right
   thing."  Depending on the stylesheet language you're using
   this will be very easy or very hard (or somewhere in between)
   and very fast or very slow (or somewhere in between).

2. Pre-process your document to augment the source so that it reads:

  <para>Some text referring to a product number
  <productnumber>X-13-144</productnumber><indexterm>
  <primary>X-13-144</primary></indexterm> that needs to be 
  indexed.</para>

  Then use standard indexing tools to produce the index

3. Some combination of 1 and 2. You could preprocess all of the
   product numbers so that they had IDs; then use an external
   tool to build an index (i.e. a docbook <index>) of them based
   on ID. Then just format the index.

Does that help?
                                        Cheers,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | What good is a can of worms if you
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | never open it?--Bob Arning
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    |