Re: [docbook] DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 24 Sep2003

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld@sympatico.ca>]

Norman Walsh wrote:

> 8b. Topic Index
> 
> NW: Explains the problem after more discussion with the submitter: the
> need is really for general index terms of different types.
> 
> MS: TEI has this feature. And if you generate an index just from other
> markup, then you don't get the richness of secondary, tertiary, etc.
> If you really wanted to make a sophisticated index with different
> types, you'd need to have this kind of markup.
> 
> NW: What are the semantics of this attribute?
> 
> Proposal: add a 'type' attribute to 'indexterm' and 'index' to support
> this markup.
> 
> Accepted.
> 
> BS: How tightly we need to define the processing expectations?
> 
> Proposed semantics:
> 
> Indexterms of type 'x' go in index of type 'x'. An index with no type
> gets all of the index terms regardless of their type.
> 
> In 4.3?
> 
> Yes.

That's awesome !

I'm now looking into patches for the xsl stylesheets to make that work.
Looking into xhtml/index.xsl, I find the following comment, which I find
slightly confusing, and may be even contradictory to the above processing
expectations:

   <!-- some implementations use completely empty index tags to indicate -->
   <!-- where an automatically generated index should be inserted. so -->
   <!-- if the index is completely empty, skip it. Unless generate.index -->
   <!-- is non-zero, in which case, this is where the automatically -->
   <!-- generated index should go. -->

So what should I do ? Should I (for the time being) simply assume the
'generate.index' parameter is non-zero ?

Regards,
		Stefan