Re: [docbook] external indexes (was: RFE 714764 - 'typed' indexes)

[Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com>]

Jirka Kosek wrote:

 > Tobias Reif wrote:
 >> If I ever would need more than one index for a document (let's say
 >> it's a book), then I guess I could do it something like this:
 >>
 >>   * Make no changes to the book itself.
 >>   * Create two or more indexing documents.
 >>     Each would probably be written in some custom XML lang (since the
 >>     mechanism is not (yet?) standardized).
 >
 > It is. There are Topic Maps which are perfectly suitable for such
 > task.
 > With XML you will probably use XTM -- XML based language for
 > serialization of Topic Maps.

I know TM/XTM, and there are various other formats/languages one could use.
Though it's not clear how one would point to a single word which is not 
wrapped in a tag (only with many more words); for this, something like 
tagging inside the book or regexen seems to be necessary. So I wrote "I 
could do it something like this" and "probably [would] be written in 
some custom XML lang". I didn't say that there's no other way.

What I meant is that a mechanism for external indexes hasn't (yet) been 
incorporated in or normatively referenced by the DocBook standard, and 
thus some non-DocBook language (custom or not) would need to be combined 
with DocBook , and thus existing DocBook tools are unlikely to support 
this mechanism.

Tobi