summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Master/texmf-dist/doc/xindy/style-tutorial-1.html
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'Master/texmf-dist/doc/xindy/style-tutorial-1.html')
-rw-r--r--Master/texmf-dist/doc/xindy/style-tutorial-1.html92
1 files changed, 92 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Master/texmf-dist/doc/xindy/style-tutorial-1.html b/Master/texmf-dist/doc/xindy/style-tutorial-1.html
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..890b1ecd8b9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Master/texmf-dist/doc/xindy/style-tutorial-1.html
@@ -0,0 +1,92 @@
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
+<HTML>
+<HEAD>
+ <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="SGML-Tools 1.0.9">
+ <TITLE>XINDY Style File Tutorial: About xindy</TITLE>
+ <LINK HREF="style-tutorial-2.html" REL=next>
+
+ <LINK HREF="style-tutorial.html#toc1" REL=contents>
+</HEAD>
+<BODY>
+<A HREF="style-tutorial-2.html">Next</A>
+Previous
+<A HREF="style-tutorial.html#toc1">Contents</A>
+<HR>
+<H2><A NAME="s1">1. About <SF>xindy</SF></A></H2>
+
+<P><SF>xindy</SF> means fle<B>x</B>ible <B>ind</B>exing s<B>y</B>stem. It is an
+indexing system that can be used to generate book-like indexes for
+arbitrary document preparation systems. This term includes systems
+such as TeX [1] and LaTeX [2], the Nroff-family
+or SGML-based systems (e.g. HTML) that process some kind of text and
+generate indexing information. It is not fixed to any specific system,
+but can be configured for a wide variety of purposes.
+<P>Authors sometimes wish to include an index into their document, but
+very often their document preparation systems aren't able to produce
+indexes on their own, or the capabilities of the built-in indexers are
+insufficient and produce ugly looking results. More often they use
+separate specialized tools for this purpose, sometimes called
+<EM>index processors</EM>.
+<P>In comparison to other index processors <SF>xindy</SF> has several
+powerful features that make it an ideal framework for describing and
+generating complex indexes. Its most interesting features are
+<P>
+<DL>
+<P>
+<DT><B>Internationality</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 even be
+processed by many index processors let alone 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 language specific rules. One example of such a rule would
+be
+<P>
+<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
+<PRE>
+(sort-rule "ä" "ae")
+</PRE>
+</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
+<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 ("ä") is sorted into german indexes. With an appropriate set
+of rules on can express the complete rules of a specific language.
+<P>
+<DT><B>User Definable Location Types</B><DD><P>Locations are the entities an
+index entry points to. Often used locations are <EM>page numbers</EM>,
+<EM>section numbers</EM>, etc. <SF>xindy</SF> allows to define new kinds of
+types to be composed of basic entities like arabic numbers, roman
+numerals, letters, etc. which can be used to describe new index types.
+Examples of these entities can be books that have a page numbering
+scheme that starts from 1 for each new chapter resulting in page
+numbers of the form <EM>1-13, 2-15, 2-20</EM>, etc. This type of locations
+can often be found in computer manuals. A more complex structure is
+represented by the locations <EM>Psalm 46, 1-8</EM> and <EM>Genesis 1,
+31</EM>. Even the structure of bible verses can be described allowing
+<SF>xindy</SF> to correctly sort and process indexes for documents with a
+completely different structure.
+<P>
+<DT><B>Highly Configurable Markup</B><DD><P>Since a index processor is only one
+component in a document preparation system it ought to fit smoothly
+into the complete environment. Many text processing systems use the
+concept of <EM>environments</EM> that can be used to describe the markup
+of the text entities. Our approach is based on this concept which has
+proved to be expressive enough for most applications. As an example
+one can view systems such as TeX, SGML and its instance HTML, GNU
+Info, RTF and the Nroff-familiy of document formatters. The markup of
+an index can be defined for all of these systems in a very comfortable
+though extremly powerful way.
+<P>
+</DL>
+<P>
+<P>
+<P>
+<HR>
+<A HREF="style-tutorial-2.html">Next</A>
+Previous
+<A HREF="style-tutorial.html#toc1">Contents</A>
+</BODY>
+</HTML>