[ docbook-Feature Requests-713566 ] new attribute to classify index terms

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Feature Requests item #713566, was opened at 2003-04-02 07:18
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>Category: DocBook XSL
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Stefan Seefeld (stefan)
Assigned to: Norman Walsh (nwalsh)
Summary: new attribute to classify index terms

Initial Comment:
It would be desirable to be able to generate mutiple
indices, for various  
used defined types. With a new classifier attribute in
both, the indexterm 
and the index element this is possible.

<index classifier="foobar"/> would then generate an
index of all terms 
defined with the "foobar" classifier, while <index/>
would index all 
terms.

http://www.gnu.org/manual/texinfo/html_mono/texinfo.html#Indices
explains how such a feature could be put to good use.

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Comment By: Stefan Seefeld (stefan)
Date: 2003-04-05 00:56

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attached is a patch to enable typed indexes in html documents
(diff against docbook-xsl-1.60.1). This patch uses the 'type' 
attribute, as suggested by Michael Smith.

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Comment By: Michael Smith (xmldoc)
Date: 2003-04-04 10:01

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Hi Stefan,

No, you didn't misunderstand -- the 'profiling' support is just
for conditionally or optionally omitting certain parts of a
source document.

After reading through your feature request more carefully
and also reading through the RFE you submitted, I can
see a big value in what you're suggesting (generation of
multiple indexes based on 'types' of indexterms). I know
that other authoring applications like FrameMaker support
that, so it'd be nice to see it supported in the DocBook
system as well.

That said, this could be implemented in the stylesheets
without (for now) any changes being made to the DTD.
That is, the stylesheets could be made to support use
of one of the existing common attributes for this purpose,
probably either "condition" or "role".

But for the long term, I think adding an attribute to
indexterm to "formalize" would be a good idea. I think
I'd be inclined to go with an attribute named "type" instead
of "classifier", though. 

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Comment By: Stefan Seefeld (stefan)
Date: 2003-04-02 14:22

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Michael,

thanks for pointing me towards the profiling stuff. I
believe it is
not appropriate for what I have in mind, as it seems to be only
concerned about optional xml segments.

In contrast, I want to preserve all items (indexterms), but
classify 
them with a user provided string. This allows to generate 
classifier-specific indexes.

As an example imagine my document containing lots of 
definitions which I want to index. However, there are different
kinds of items defined, such as types, variables, functions,
etc.

I thus want to generate an 'type index', 'variable index', 
'function index', etc.

So I do think that profiling isn't the right tool, but may
be I misunderstood it...

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Comment By: Michael Smith (xmldoc)
Date: 2003-04-02 11:10

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Stefan,

Have you looked at the existing "profiling" (conditional text)  
capability provided in the standard DocBook XSL stylesheet 
distribution?

Take a look at the URL below for some how-to documentation
on profiling (from Bob Stayton).

http://sagehill.net/xml/docbookxsl/SpecialHandling.html#Profiling

So unless I'm misunderstanding, I think the capability you're
asking for is already supported by the current XSL stylesheets,
and there is no need to add an attribute to the DTD to support
it.

But if you believe differently and want to request the addition
of a new attribute to the DTD, you need to file the request
as an RFE. The place for submitting RFEs is:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=add&group_id=21935&atid=384107

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