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A Flexible Indexing System


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Announce: xindy version 1.1




I'd like to announce version 1.1 of the indexing system `xindy'.

xindy was developed to overcome the limitations of the `makeindex'
system. If you have to process texts in your own language or you don't
like to write actual keys anymore, xindy is the right tool for *you*!

Check out xindy's official homepage

	http://www.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de/xindy

or the ftp resources

	CTAN: ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/support/xindy

	      ftp://ftp.th-darmstadt.de/pub/tex/src/xindy

Below is a description of xindy's most important features:

Internationalization:

	xindy can be configured to process indexes for many languages
	with different letter sets and different sorting rules. For
	example, many roman languages such as Italian, Portuguese or
	Spanish contain accented letters such as A', A`, n~ which
	often can't be processed by many index processors not talking
	about sorting them correctly into an index. The xindy-system
	can be configured to process these alphabets by defining sort-
	and merge-rules that allow expressing of language specific
	rules. One example of such a rule would be

		(sort-rule "ä" "ae")

	defining that a word containing the umlaut-a will be sorted as
	if it contained the letters "ae" instead. This is
	one form of how the umlaut-a is sorted into german indexes.
	With an appropriate set of rules one can express the complete
	rules of a specific language.

User-definable Location Classes:

	Locations are the entities an index entry points to. Commonly
	used locations are page numbers, section numbers, etc. xindy
	allows to define new kinds of types to be composed of smaller
	entities like arabic numbers, roman numerals, letters, etc.
	which can be used to describe new location classes. Examples
	of these entities appear in books that have a page numbering
	scheme that starts from 1 for each new chapter resulting in
	page numbers of the form 1-13, 2-15, 2-20, etc. This type of
	locations can often be found in computer manuals. A more
	complex structure is represented by the locations Psalm 46,
	1-8 and Genesis 1, 31. Even the structure of bible verses can
	be described allowing xindy to correctly sort and process
	indexes for documents with a completely different
	structure.

Highly Configurable Markup:

	Since an index processor is only one component in a document
	preparation system it ought to fit smoothly into the rest of
	the environment. Many document preparation systems use the
	concept of environments that can be used to describe
	the markup of the text entities. Our approach is based on this
	concept which has proven to be expressive enough for most
	applications. Systems such as TeX, SGML and its instance HTML,
	GNU Info, RTF and the Nroff-familiy of document formatters
	operate with environments. The markup of an index can be
	defined for all of these systems in a very comfortable though
	extremly powerful way. xindy comes with a context-based markup
	strategy that uses a form of event dispatching mechanism
	(sounds cool, eh? It is!)


--
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Roger Kehr			   kehr@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department          Technical University of Darmstadt