Indexing the DITA 1.3 spec

[Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>]

Great discussion, and I hope it will lead us to consensus on how we should index the DITA specification.

Given the number of items raised and the extent of people's strong feelings, I seriously doubt we will be able to provide any indexes in the PDF output for the DITA 1.3 release, however.

If that's the case, then we need to address the issue of the index that appears in the CHM. It's quite gnarly. I think we have a number of options:

1. Remove the index. (I'm not sure that this is possible; my memory is that index and TOC are tied together -- You either get both or none.)
   
2. Ignore it.
3. Comment out the index entries from the Language Reference; that will reduce most of the noise.
4. Index the currently topic clusters in the Architectural Spec that have not yet been indexed:
1. Branch filtering
2. Configuration et al
3. Coding requirements

I doubt we have time for #4. #2 is a valid option; this is what we did for DITA 1.2. I think we need to strongly consider just implementing #3.

--
Best,
Kris

Kristen James Eberlein
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype)