Re: Transforming XML or other intermediate representation of Texinfo; category system

[Jacob Bachmeyer]

Robert Dodier wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 5:29 PM Jacob Bachmeyer <jcb62281@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
> > This somewhat resembles, at least in concept, indexes.  Perhaps what you
> > really want is a set of custom indexes by tag?
> >     
>
> It doesn't seem like indexes is the appropriate approach here. The
> main problem is that each index has to be defined by @defindex, so
> somebody, not Texinfo, has to trawl the document to discover what has
> been mentioned as a tag or category or whatever we wish to call it.
> There are other problems, e.g. indexes can't have spaces in their
> names, so tags or categories such as "Complex variables" would have to
> get fixed up somehow. Another problem is that the indexes to which an
> item belongs are not shown on the item itself, but an important part
> of the tag concept is that the set of tags for an item is shown on the
> item.

While index entries are themselves invisible, Texinfo already has macros 
that both generate visible output and add index entries.  Generating the 
@defindex commands is a simple matter of grep/sed/awk over the document 
to identify and extract the categories used if each category is to have 
its own mini-index.

Another option would be a single "tag" index containing all tags and the 
nodes using them, but I think this would only show the tag name in the 
index.


-- Jacob