Re: sorting texinfo indices?

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 01:11:02PM -0700, Mark Polesky wrote:
>> 
>> ...from which texinfo magically generates IR A. "Indices":
>> http://kainhofer.com/~lilypond/Documentation/internals/Indices.html
>> 
>> I'd like the list (and others like it) to be sorted according to
>> the algorithm in scm/lily-sort.scm. Judging from recent threads, I
>> figure some python tweaking would be necessary? I'm not about to
>> learn python, but does anyone know how this could be done?
>
> - download the texinfo source code.  It's in C.
> - download the texi2html source code.  It's in perl.
> - implement your favorite sorting routine as an optional feature
>   in both those projects.  Alternately, add hooks to those
>   projects so that users can specify their own sorting routines in
>   some language.
> - wait 1 year for new releases to come out in those projects
> - get the sorting you want in those indexes.
>
> As I said in
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2009-07/msg00710.html
> it's pretty much beyond our control, and IMO totally not worth the
> effort involved.

The sorting is done by a binary called "texindex".  Creating one's own
sorter with that name and placing it at the front of PATH for the
duration of the documentation creating commands should be sufficient.
No need to otherwise meddle with texinfo AFAICT.

Not trivial, but you could start with a stock texindex source and go
from there.  But then that might be quite more versatile than necessary;
likely a much simpler program would work for this, and then one might
actually be able to use a guile script, employing the original sorting
code.

-- 
David Kastrup