gather index terms from documents to create index page with links

• Key: FOR-280
• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Johannes Schaefer
• Component/s: Core operations
• Affects Version/s: 0.6, 0.8

Description

I started some work on index creation, i.e. put index terms from around the project documents into an index with backreferences.

Since I'm new and don't have a lot of time to spend on this, here's what I achieved. Any help and hint on how to proceed is welcome!

Unzip the sample project in the attachment to a new project dir.
Copy the sitemap.xmap file to its proper place.
Do a forrest run to see how it works and what I've done.

Comments

[Johannes Schaefer]

have fun!

[Johannes Schaefer]

Sorry, there is no online site available showing index creation.

[Johannes Schaefer]

How-to:
1. Copy the stylesheet abc2document.xsl to your project's
   skin-directory. It extracts the <indexterm>s from wholesite.xml.
2. Copy abcindex.xmap to project/src/documentation.
   This is an exact copy of aggregate.xmap plus:
   <map:transform src=".../xslt/html/abc2document.xsl"/>
3. Copy sitemap.xmap to project/src/documentation, it contains:
   <map:match pattern="abc.xml">
     <map:mount uri-prefix="" src="abcindex.xmap" check-reload="yes"/>
   </map:match>
4. Tag your <indexterm>indexterms</indexterm> in the source-xml.
   Note: this breaks with forrest's document-vXX.dtd's!
5. Add <abc label="A..Z Index" href="abc.html"> to your site.xml.

You can use the small project, unzip it and do 'forrest run', too.

There's still a lot to do, e.g.,
- indexterms shouldn't be case-sensitive,
- references shouldn't repeat, ...

[Johannes Schaefer]

use forrest-index_v02.zip as a small demo project, containing all the files

[Johannes Schaefer]

abcindex.xmap creates wholesite.xml and then passes it through abc2document.xsl

[Johannes Schaefer]

Project's sitemap.xmap to match abc.xml

[Johannes Schaefer]

extract indexterms from wholesite.xml and put them into forrest-document format

[Ross Gardler]

This sounds cool (not looked at it yet, but it is something I would like to use). However, I do have a concern.

You point out that this breaks the Forrest XDoc DTD's. We are moving the DTD's to a subset of XHTML2 and will be unlikely to add any new elements that are not part of XHTML2 (I don't think indexTerm is).

I would suggest you use the class attribute of a surrounding element like <span>. We don't have that in the DTD's either at present, but I see this as a pretty good reason to add it, what do others think? Are there alternatives?

[David Crossley]

We can add to the Forrest document-v2* DTD as compatible with XHTML2. This email discussion is part of the plan:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=forrest-dev&m=102909917505608
Yes "span" and "div" are on the list.

[Johannes Schaefer]

Glossary and Index are pretty much the same; although I did not look at Ross' work; not sure about citations but might be related as well.

Contrary to Jahannes last comment, this index work is not the same as the glossary work in another issue.

Johnnes' index work extracts index terms from content and creates an index page for them.

The glossary works the other way around. You start with a glossary page, complete with aliases, accronyms and definitions and insert links into the documents from there (although the link insertion is not automatic yet, the doc needs to be marked up).

[David Crossley]

It seems that Urgency field was accidently set, so now Urgency=none.

It certainly would be a good thing to have, so raised the Reporter-Priority to Major.

Any takers to build upon Johannes' work?

[Gavin]

Arrgh, this looks interesting, another case of attachments gone, where can I find them?

[David Crossley]

The attachments in FOR-280-attachments.tar.gz are retrieved from our old issue tracker. Contributed by Johannes Schaefer.