[Scrollkeeper-devel] Index support

[Laszlo K. <las...@Su...>]

Hi,

We've been talking for a while about adding index support to
Scrollkeeper. It looks like we have the people to work on it now, Mary
Dwyer (from Sun), John Fleck and Sasha most of the time. mary would
probably do the development work.

I frame up my idea about how should it be done and we can discuss it.

I dont know much about index tags in DocBook/SGML so I am not sure how
we implement this. I think there are two ways of indexing, one that just
defines the index term and an "anchor" to where it is discussed (or
maybe more anchors?) and the other holds the index definition itself.

Anyway I think the way it should be done is that we take the SGML file
and extract the index info from it into a very simple xml file. Ideally
this should contain only the index strings and the "anchor" in the text
that is associated with them. I dont know if the SGML index tags support
this aproach.

On the technical side I think we should use a SAX interface rather then
a DOM tree as very little info from the SGML docs is actually used. 

The index extractor should be a new binary or part of the Scrollkeeper
library if we manage to turn SK to a library.

This is a very short description, but I think it contains the main
issues.

What do you think about it?

Laszlo