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-<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
-<HTML>
-<HEAD>
- <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="SGML-Tools 1.0.9">
- <TITLE>XINDY FAQ: General Questions</TITLE>
- <LINK HREF="faq-2.html" REL=next>
-
- <LINK HREF="faq.html#toc1" REL=contents>
-</HEAD>
-<BODY>
-<A HREF="faq-2.html">Next</A>
-Previous
-<A HREF="faq.html#toc1">Contents</A>
-<HR>
-<H2><A NAME="s1">1. General Questions</A></H2>
-
-<H2><A NAME="ss1.1">1.1 Why a completely new indexing tool? <CODE>makeindex</CODE> works fine!</A>
-</H2>
-
-<P>
-<P>With the <EM>International MakeIndex</EM> project, Joachim Schrod and
-Gabor Herr have shown that adding extensions to
-<CODE>makeindex</CODE> is a difficult job. Thus we have decided to develop a
-new indexing tool from scratch. The new tool is based on a new
-requirements analysis and offers very interesting features for
-processing very complex indexing schemes. The resulting index model is
-described in:
-<P>
-<OL>
-<LI> Roger Kehr, <SF>xindy</SF> -- <EM>A Flexible Indexing System</EM>,
-Proceedings of the EuroTeX'98, St. Malo, France, March 1998
-</LI>
-<LI> Roger Kehr, <SF>xindy</SF> -- <EM>A Flexible Indexing System</EM>,
-Technical Report No. 11/1997, Computer Science Department, Darmstadt
-University of Technology, 1997. Also accessible from the xindy
-homepage.
-</LI>
-<LI> Roger Kehr, xindy <EM>Ein Flexibles Indexierungssystem</EM>,
-Studienarbeit FB Informatik, TH-Darmstadt, November 1995.
-</LI>
-<LI> Joachim Schrod, <EM>An International Version of MakeIndex</EM>,
-Cahiers GUTenberg, 10, p81-90, 1991
-</LI>
-<LI> Joachim Schrod and Gabor Herr, <EM>MakeIndex Version 3.0</EM>,
-Technical University of Darmstadt, 1991
-</LI>
-</OL>
-<P>
-<P>
-<P>
-<H2><A NAME="ss1.2">1.2 I'm an old <CODE>makeindex</CODE> wizard. What does <SF>xindy</SF> offer that <CODE>makeindex</CODE> doesn't?</A>
-</H2>
-
-<P>
-<P>Here are the most important differences between <SF>xindy</SF> and
-<CODE>makeindex</CODE>:
-<P>
-<P>
-<DL>
-<P>
-<DT><B>Internationalization</B><DD><P><SF>xindy</SF> 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,
-French, Portuguese or Spanish contain accentuated letters such as
-&Agrave;, &Aacute;, &ntilde;. Other languages from northern Europe
-have letters like &Auml;, &Oslash;, &aelig; or &szlig; which often
-can't be processed by many index processors not talking about sorting
-them correctly into an index. The <SF>xindy</SF>-system can be configured
-to process these alphabets by defining <EM>sort</EM> and
-<EM>merge-rules</EM> that allow expressing of language specific rules.
-One example of such a rule would be
-<P>
-<PRE>
-(sort-rule &quot;ä&quot; &quot;ae&quot;)
-</PRE>
-<P>defining that a word containing the umlaut-a will be sorted as if it
-contained the letters <CODE>ae</CODE> 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.
-<P>
-<DT><B>Location classes.</B><DD><P><CODE>makeindex</CODE> is able to recognize and
-process arabic numbers, roman numerals and letter-based alphabets as
-specifiers for the indexed location. Simple composite structures of
-these are also possible to process. This implicit recognition scheme
-has completely been dropped in favour of a well-defined and very
-powerful declaration scheme called <EM>location-classes</EM>. Thus,
-<SF>xindy</SF> initally does not know any location-class by default and
-must be instructed to accept certain location-classes. A typical
-declaration might look like:
-<P>
-<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
-<PRE>
-(define-location-class "page-numbers" ("arabic-numbers"))
-</PRE>
-</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
-<P>This declares that page numbers consist of the enumeration of the
-arabic numbers. The arabic numbers are referred to as <EM>alphabets</EM>.
-Users may use the pre-defined alphabets arabic numbers, roman
-numerals, etc. or define new alphabets as needed. See the tutorial
-that comes with this distribution for some examples.
-<P>
-<DT><B>The concept of attributes.</B><DD><P>With <CODE>makeindex</CODE> one can assign a
-markup to each index entry using the encapsulators (usually following
-the vertical bar sign in an index entry command). For example in the
-specification
-<P>
-<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
-<PRE>
-\index{xindy|bold}
-</PRE>
-</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
-<P>the encapsulator is <CODE>bold</CODE> which encapsulates the page-numbers in
-the markup-phase. An additional TeX-macro must be supplied to assign
-some markup with the page number. This concept has completely been
-dropped in <SF>xindy</SF> in favour of a more powerful scheme called
-<EM>attributes</EM>. Attributes can be used to (i) define several grouping
-and ordering rules with locations and we can define (ii) markup-tags
-for the document preparation system.
-<P>The result of this design decision is that the user is required to
-define the attributes in the style file and not in the document
-preparation system. The reasons lie in the more powerful markup scheme
-of <SF>xindy</SF> which can't be specified in the document processor anymore.
-In fact, the <CODE>makeindex</CODE>-like markup is only a small subset of
-<SF>xindy</SF>s features.
-<P>
-<DT><B>Cross references.</B><DD><P>Cross-references were implemented in
-<CODE>makeindex</CODE> with the encapsulation mechanism, which only served for
-markup purposes. This has been completely separated in <SF>xindy</SF>.
-Here we distinguish cleanly between attributes and cross references.
-This makes it possible to implement <EM>checked</EM> cross references,
-i.e. cross-refernces that can be checked if they point to an existing
-index entry instead of somewhere ``behind-the-moon''.
-<P>
-<DT><B>Less command-line options.</B><DD><P><SF>xindy</SF> has dropped the usage of
-command-line options in favour of a well-defined indexstyle
-description language. Thus, options that could be activated at the
-command-line level of <CODE>makeindex</CODE> must now be specified in the
-indexstyle file. This sounds more restrictive than it is, because the
-indexstyle files can be composed from several modules which makes it
-possible to write style files in just a few lines of code.
-<P>
-<DT><B>Raw index parser.</B><DD><P>The parser built into <CODE>makeindex</CODE> has
-completely been separated from the core <SF>xindy</SF> system. <SF>xindy</SF>
-understands a well-defined specification language for the raw index
-that is completely different from <CODE>makeindex</CODE>, but in our opinion
-more maintainable than the <CODE>makeindex</CODE> format. This requires a
-separate filter that transforms arbitrary indexes to the <SF>xindy</SF>
-format. An example filter is the program <CODE>tex2xindy</CODE> that comes
-with this distribution.
-<P>
-</DL>
-<P>Summed up, some of the implicit assumptions made by <CODE>makeindex</CODE>
-have been replaced and now burdend to the user. The reason is that
-many of <CODE>makeindex</CODE>'s assumptions were no longer valid in
-multi-language environments or documents with arbitrary location
-structures. This also characterizes <SF>xindy</SF> more as a framework
-instead of a end-user-tailored product. One should notice that writing
-an appropriate index style is an essential part of the document
-preparation process and should be tailored to each document anew.
-<P>
-<P>
-<P>
-<P>
-<HR>
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