A long term annoyance for me has been the many sections with non-alphabetical
headings at the start of many Texinfo documents, in the PDF output.
For example, the "General Index" in the Texinfo manual has sections for
the following characters:
! " # & ' ( , - < > ? _ ` @ 8
Each only has one or two index entries listed.
I think it would be more typical to list all of these in a single section.
I think listing them all under "*" would be better.
I would like to achieve this using the @sortas command. For example:
$ cat equal-sort-keys.texi
\input texinfo
@cindex @sortas{*} \ (backslash)
@cindex @sortas{*} / (forward slash)
@cindex another index entry
Index:
@printindex cp
@bye
I thought this might produce two sections, one "*" with both
backslash and forward slash, and one "A" with a single entry.
Running "pdftex equal-sort-keys.texi" produces:
$ cat equal-sort-keys.cp
@entry{*}{1}{@backslashchar {} (backslash)}
@entry{*}{1}{/ (forward slash)}
@entry{another index entry}{1}{another index entry}
However, texindex produces the following:
$ cat equal-sort-keys.cps
@initial {*}
@entry{@backslashchar {} (backslash)}{1}
@initial {A}
@entry{another index entry}{1}
You can see that there actually only two index entries there. The
two index entries with sort key "*" have been merged together.
I remember that the convention of merging index entries with the
same sort key was very old (from when I looked at this before, several
years ago), but I thought we could reconsider this, as I do not actually
see any advantage of merging the entries.
Does anyone have an opinion on this?
I also thought that not merging index entries would work well when
entries differed only by accents (or maybe even only by letter case).
For example, if an index file had:
@entry{Bogen}{1}{Bogen}
@entry{Bogen}{1}{Bögen}
- texindex could compare the actual text of the entries (which are
different, as "o" is different from "ö") when sorting the index entries,
not just look at the sort keys. Then the index sorting would be close
to perfect for several European languages.
(I quickly checked with "makeinfo equal-sort-keys.texi" and it appears
not to merge the index entries.)
