Re: Preferred Index Terms

Especially once translated versions come into this, maintaining a "preferred" markup in the content gets fussy and awkward. External lists -- these are the English prefered terms, these are the Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Finnish, etc. -- give a single thing that can be maintained in one place by the language-knowledgeable and the processing can use that during index creation to know which locator gets special rendering.

Graydon Saunders | Publishing Solutions Developer | Precision Content
Direct: +1 (647)265-8500 x106| Email: graydon@precisioncontent.com | www.precisioncontent.com

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An indexing requirement that DITA does not currently satisfy out of the box is identify an instance of an index term as being the "preferred" instance. Preferred instances are usually rendered by highlighting the page number (or other locator) for that entry.

DocBook provides for this with the @significance attribute of the <indexterm> element:

https://tdg.docbook.org/tdg/5.2/indexterm.singular.html

Where the @significance attribute has the value "normal" or "preferred":

<indexterm significance="preferred"><primary>apple</primary></indexterm>

It seems reasonable to add this mechanism to DITA.

I can see two ways it could be done:

1. Add an attribute like @significance to <indexterm>, basically exactly what DocBook does.
2. Specialize <indexterm> to <indexterm-preferred>.

Option 2 could of course be done by anyone who wants to define the specialization, and maybe that's the answer: if you have this requirement, implement the specialization and the processing for it.

But I wanted to at least record the requirement for discussion.

Cheers,

E.
--
Eliot Kimber
http://contrext.com

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