[drupal-docs] generating Drupal Handbook pdf's manually

[Djun Kim]

Quoting Gabor Hojtsy <gabor at hojtsy.hu>:

>>    A more conventional approach would be to encourage authors
>> to tag individual words or <span class='index-entry'
>> key='phrase'>phrases</span>.  This might be something we could
>> ask authors to do.
>>
>> Your idea is interesting, though. I'm trying to envision how this
>> might work.  This might be a useful way to deal with some of
>> the 'remaining 30%' of indexing which is difficult to do automatically.
>> This tends to be the subtle and challenging portion of the work.
>
> DocBook has quite complete indexing support :)
>
>   http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/07/14/dbndx.html
>

   True - any print orient markup scheme must have such support, of course.
Thanks for the reference, BTW - looks like a good read.

   I was trying to make a couple of points with my example.

     - it's entirely possible to do this in plain old HTML
     - an index refererence is usually anchored to a word or
       phrase in the text - associating it to a node will not work
       in print, because eventually the reference needs to be
       associated with a page number.
     - a basic use case for indexing would be: an author marks up
       a word or phrase intended for indexing in the source text.

Indexing is something which is necessary for print, and not so necessary
for web publishing, thanks to search engines.   I suppose my basic
belief is that a text will indexed 'by intent' - someone will say
to themselves 'this word/phrase needs to be in the index', or
'I wasn't able to find this in the index, but it should be there',
or some other chain of intentions leading to the act of
inserting an index entry will occur for the user.   I can't really
see casual readers spontaneously looking at a node and deciding to
help index it.

Having an 'exit survey' from search-delivered pages would help
to associate a phrase with the node; this could be recorded somewhere
to help automated or human markup of the node.

I suppose another way of looking at this would be to have the
indexes which a search engine would build explicitly extracted
and marked up in the source text.

I think I'm struggling with my own lack of imagination, but I can't
see the generation of detailed indexes happening as an 'emergent
feature' of community edited texts - structure yes, cross-references
and external references yes - but indexes... hmm.



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