First an introduction. I have been using latex to typeset a lexicon of animal names in Chuukese. I wanted to be able to specify an arbitrary collating sequence. With a good bit of help, and over several years of time, I wrote an emacs lisp sort function to sort accoring to a more or less arbitrary sequence. Xindy now proposes to do what I have had to kludge to do. I would like to inquire whether the sort functions themselves are accessible and useable outside xindy. This could be useful as a generalized sort function. In fact, it would seem more useful in that context. Xindy would use the same routine as anyone was using to sort this language. I think it would be a service to native speakers to enable native linguists in Chuuk to tinker, and come up with what looked right. Or just teachers. I like my collating sequence for me, but I am not a native speaker. I did what xindy is doing---make "a and a equivalent. (Rather make "a look to the sort program like an a). I think that gnu sort may be amenable to rewriting, but I am not a C programmer, so I gave up. I wrote routines to sort the index in that order then had to reassemble the index. So I like the potential to do it another way, with xindy, with a few keystrokes of initial set up. Also I would like to ask about possibility for several indices: I'd like to have a scientific name index as well as a headword index. Excuse me if this is in the manual, as I have only quickly looked it over. Alan Davis -- Alan E. Davis Marianas High School (Science Department) AAA196, Box 10001 adavis@netpci.com http://www.saipan.netpci.com/~adavis Saipan, MP 96950 15.16oN 145.7oE GMT+10 Northern Mariana Islands