Hi Helge!
Thanks for your comments.
Am 07.02.2005 um 13:37 schrieb Helge Hafting:
This seems useful for several purposes, but perhaps a warning about
automatic index generation. The frequency is a useful statistic, but
high frequency have no impact on wether to index the word. The obvious
example here should be the top word on your list. :-) We index what "people
might want to look up", not "all we have".
I know, I'm aiming at a kind of semi-automatic index generation. Creating
an alphabetically sorted wordlist with frequencies as a hint and an easy way
to navigate to the context and back would be a start. Using a stopword list
would even remove all the most frequent words except "LyX" and "LaTeX" :-)
So once the user prunes the list he/she would have a good start.
Also, make sure this thing does not get in the
way of indexing whole phrases, math expressions, images and other stuff that
don't show up in a wordlist. Well, I guess it doesn't, but still.
Once there is index markup in place the system should handle it conservatively.
Finally, and most important: Autoindexing every occurence of some
index-worthy word often yields a useless index. Perhaps there are
cases where such indexing is mandatory. But for an ordinary book the
requirement is not to index every occurence of some word, but the 1,2 or 3
most important places the word occur. Few people want to mess around
with "word, 1,2,6,8,12-16, 14, 18,19,22, 25-31,36" only to discover that
"word" is thorougly explained on page 14 and 26-28, and all the other references
merely mention "word" briefly.
But removing index references from that list using the jump function from below
should be easier than the other way round.
...
I also think a function which jumps from one IndexInset to the next with the same
key could be useful.
Perhaps the program shouldn't add the entries at all, just move from word
to word and ask wether to add an entry at that point?
Good point. OTOH this would have to be repeated with every index word.
Maybe an additional function which acts as a kind of search and replace,
maybe even with regular expressions?
The way of index editing I fancy right now would consist of the following functions:
1.) create an initial index from all words minus stop words. Insert the index references
and open an index buffer with the alphabetically sorted list.
2.) Edit the index buffer: Delete entries, change the ordering, collate entries, create
subitems, ...
3.) Have a jump function from an entry in the index buffer to the occurence and between
occurences, and back.
4.) Update the text from the index buffer: delete unwanted index insets, change params
of index insets, add new index insets.
5.) Regenerate the index buffer with existing entries, a la makeindex.
The index buffer would only be WYSIWYM of the true index: back references to index insets
instead of pagenumbers, key and actual text both visible, word frequency as a hint, ...
You'll find that page ranges are partially supported already, an index entry
that is repeated on several consecutive pages is automatically coalesced
to a range. :-)
Yeah, but what if you want to index a whole chapter, like "Algorithms, p132--211" ? ;-)
* special markup
Now that'd be something - ability to use advanced indexing without having
to type latex, or watch out for specials like "_" and so on.
I thought of index specific charstyles like "see" or "def", maybe also "emph" and "bold".
Ciao /Andreas
