Re: Docs with index

Richard Huxton writes:

> Can't think of any other categories, just more entries in each. I think it
> might prove useful to identify weaknesses in the docs since if it doesn't
> index well it probably needs reworking.

The documentation is, despite attempts to make it less so, still mostly in
reference style.  Thus, you can make a lot of index terms directly out of
section and chapter headings.  The real trick will be generic terms such
as "performance", "storage", "hard disk".

You could also look at it the other way around:  the reason that the
documentation is so much in reference style may be that in the absence of
an index it would otherwise be impossible to find the relevant places.

> The only thing that struck me was the fact that lines like "see macaddr"
> aren't clickable, but presumably that's down to the stylesheet.

Indeed:

|     if ($idx->{'seealso'}) {
|         # it'd be nice to make this a link...
|         if ($lastout) {
|             print OUT "\n  </$lastout>\n";
|             $lastout = "";
|         }
|         print OUT $indent, "<seealsoie>", &escape($idx->{'seealso'}), "</seealsoie>\n";
|     }

It doesn't seem altogether impossible to fix this.  Unfortunately, the
whole thing looks kind of little-tested to me.  I've already found one
somewhat obvious bug in the index making code.  None of the other large
DocBook users in open source land use an index.

> Again - if I can be of any use, just holler.

You could attack another document, such as the admin or programmer guides,
in the same way I did.  If you're set up to build the documentation, then
you need to install the makefile patch and you're ready to go.  You need
to do make xyz.html twice to get the index right.  Don't even think of
trying this with a print output format though.

--
Peter Eisentraut      peter_e@gmx.net       http://yi.org/peter-e/