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RE: IndexTerm: why not See+ ?


A reference to a section number, or, in our case, a clause number,
can be quite useful in addition to or in place of the page number.

It depends, of course, on the conventions and practices of the 
dicipline within which you are publishing. For legal texts, there's 
a tradition (pre-dating printing!) of refering to clause numbers.

Anyway, the thing is that this is not a _per publication_ decision; 
apart from the obvious fact that some output formats shouldn't 
include page numbers, within a given rule or regulation, some 
IndexTerms should result in an index entry refering to a clause 
number, while other shouldn't.

Also, one might want to generate several indices, cf. the 
traditional author index in addition to a general keyword index. 
In a software manual, one might want a separate command index.

Right now, I think I can determine the best format of a given 
IndexTerm from the context (and the output format, of course). 

In a broader context, idices are (can be seen as) cases of Topic 
Navigation Maps. Has anyone here dabbled with that? 

There's a final CD for a Topic Map standard, ISO 13250, 
http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/sc34/document/8.htm. Refer also to 
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/gen-apps.html#topicMaps 
for links and a bit of history and context.

regards,
Peter Ring

-----Original Message-----
From: Terry Allen [mailto:tallen@sonic.net]
Sent: Friday, October 01, 1999 8:02 PM
To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: DOCBOOK: IndexTerm: why not See+ ?

<snip>

It is uncommon to see indices in which there are both page and
section references, let along page, section, and title references.
Normally one sees only one style.  So I would be inclined to set
this preference in the style sheet and not in the document markup
(relying on processing).  Note that while page numbers are familiar,
handy, and useful for print, you can't use them for an HTML 
presentation of the same material, so it's desireable anyway to
set the format in the style sheet so you can have multiple 
differing outputs.

regards, Terry


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