On Nov 14, 2007 6:25 PM, Rick Hillegas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Laura Stewart wrote: > > > > I think that what we really need to invest in is changes to the code > > that generates the docs, so that an index can be created with the > > output. Many index entries are already in the DITA files for the > > documentation and are not exposed because the code that generates the > > output is not setup to support index generation... > > +1 to the idea of generating an index. The old Cloudscape index used to > be very helpful and I think that a lot of that work has been preserved > in the existing index entry markers.
DITA 1.4 appears to have fairly complete back-of-the-book index generation: http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/SourceForgeFiles/doc/release_14.html Although I think you're referring to the old Cloudscape global index which was definitely very useful. I suppose it might be possible with XSLT and lots of time to combine the XML for each book into one massive XML and generate a global index with links into the specific books for the indexterms, at least for the HTML and HTML book formats. Relative filesystem URLs might not work for PDFs, but I wouldn't rule it out completely. At any rate, there's no built-in multi-book index feature in the DITA toolkit as far as I'm aware, so a global index would be something we'd have to build ourselves, once we migrated to DITA 1.4 and got back-of-the-book indexes working correctly. There are two problems with regular indexes, though. One is that there hasn't been an ASL release of the DITA toolkit since 1.2.2, for whatever reason, and the back-of-the-book index support for PDFs may not have been implemented for PDFs generated by the old PDF / FOP targets that were deprecated with DITA-OT 1.3.1: http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/SourceForgeFiles/doc/release_13.html The current PDF2 targets rely on the Idiom FO plugin (ok, looks like a BSD derivative although it's got a strange clause at the end) but also on the RenderX XEP rendering engine, whose free version has a license that is very restrictive and not open source friendly. So, we might not get back-of-the-book indexes even if we upgraded to DITA 1.4 without some additional effort on our part. andrew
