Re: [docbook] RFE 714764 - 'typed' indexes

[Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com>]

Michael Smith wrote:


>>Does that mean that I could create (not generate) two different indexes 
>>(sets of index terms) for the same document, as two separate XML documents?
>>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "two separate XML documents" or how that
> relates to the what the DocBook DTD allows or doesn't allow.
> 
> If you mean putting the sets of index terms into separate physical files
> and then conditionally including one or the other -- via XInclude or
> some Makefile entity/file switching or whatever -- yeah, I guess you
> could. Of course nothing in the DTD would prevent you from doing that. 
> 
> Or do you mean putting multiple sets of indexterms into the same source
> document, with a plan of conditionally including/excluding certain sets
> from processing?


I just thought that it would be much more flexible to not insert index 
term markup in the document, at all (at most place a simple reference to 
each index document). If I get a DocBook document and don't like the 
indexing, I have to work my way through the whole document and discard 
the previous work, or I have to produce a new version of the DocBook 
document (I don't have much experience with DB indexing, so I might be 
wrong). So I simply like the general possibility of separating the 
document from it's indexes; I didn't yet think about technical details.
Just as with separating content from style, it becomes easy to swith the 
other component with minimal effort.


> All that said, of course you'd need to have some support on the
> processing side for generating multiple indexes and for doing
> conditional processing of your Indexterm sets -- the 'profiling'
> capability in the DocBook xslt stylesheets or something similar. Without
> that. Otherwise, the processing app is just going to put contents of all
> the sets into the default index.


I guess I'd like to link to one indexing document, then process the doc. 
When I want to use a different indexing document, I could simply change 
the link (eg XInclude).


Tobi


-- 
http://www.pinkjuice.com/