Subject: Re: Autogenerating indexes in docbook
To: None <netbsd-docs@NetBSD.org>
From: Roland Illig <rillig@NetBSD.org>
List: netbsd-docs
Date: 04/24/2006 23:50:25
Hiroki Sato wrote:
> Jan Schaumann <jschauma@netmeister.org> wrote
>   in <20060424131237.GB7626@netmeister.org>:
> 
> js> Roland Illig <rillig@NetBSD.org> wrote:
> js>
> js> > I would like to have an additional attribute for the <varname> tag, so
> js> > that I can write <varname index="yes">CONFIGURE_ARGS</varname>, and the
> js> > variable will automatically appear in the variable index (another
> js> > appendix). From there, a backlink should go to the location where the
> js> > variable is used (for both the HTML and the PDF output). In the
> js> > page-oriented output formats, the index should contain line numbers, and
> js> > in the one-page HTML and the plain text formats, the index should
> js> > contain the section number.
> js> >
> js> > Is that possible or do we need to switch to another documentation format
> js> > to do this?
> js>
> js> It is my understanding that this should be possible.  (Just as a side
> js> note, I believe that operations like this are what make the processing
> js> of the documents slow and resource intensive, as the entire document
> js> tree needs to be processed to generate the index.)
> 
>  Yes, possible.  Generating index is still not so resource intensive
>  compared to the normal typeset process we are using now because
>  it can also be done together with generating ToC or so.
>  I think I will add this to my TODO list anyway.
> 
>  BTW, should we have a complete reference manual for make variables
>  in pkgsrc as an appendix?

I think it was Julio who told me that this would make the text less 
readable, because the variables had to be ordered to some scheme, most 
probably alphabetic, or maybe by group. The latter does not make sense 
for an appendix, since the variables are already grouped properly in the 
various main chapters. That's why I want only an index, not a reference 
chapter.

Roland