Re: Customizing HTML output of indexes

[Benjamin Kalish]

I can confirm the problem with the _javascript_. I was able to rewrite the code to get the desired behavior with the index entires, but sure enough, after the change searching the index this way would reopen the sidebar if it had been collapsed.

Personally, I'd much rather have the index entries work as expected and the sidebar reopen than have the index entries point to the top of the node and have the sidebar stay closed, but I'll poke around and see if I can figure out why the sidebar is opening and if there is a way to change that without modifying the index behavior.

Benjamin Kalish

On Fri, Sep 20, 2024 at 3:52 PM Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 19, 2024 at 03:38:12PM -0400, Benjamin Kalish wrote:
> Two related but distinct questions:
>
> 1. How can I change the index output to contain only the first column
> (index entry names linking to to the points on the page where the index
> entries occurs) and excluding the second column (node names linking to the
> top of the nodes).

There doesn't appear to be any way to achieve this in the code.

You can hide the second column using CSS:

$ cat test.texi
\input texinfo

@node Top
@top

@cindex aaa


@printindex cp


@bye

$ cat extra.css
th.sections-header-printindex { visibility: hidden }
td.printindex-index-section { visibility: hidden }

$ texi2any test.texi --html --no-split --css-include=extra.css

(texi2any 7.1.1.)

>
> 2. How can I change the behavior of the _javascript_ index search so that it
> uses the links to the point on the page where an index entry occurs instead
> of linking to the top of the node?
>
>
> (For #2 I am tempted to say this would be a preferable default behavior for
> all projects.)

I am sure it is supposed to do this already, but when I tested it it didn't.
Unfortunately there is nobody who has time or interest to maintain
this _javascript_ code and I don't think there are any active developers who
understand it very well.

I've tried looking at the code but can't spot anything obvious.

It may have been related to the fix discussed in this message:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2022-11/msg00225.html

From:   Per Bothner
Subject:        Re: info.js demo on Texinfo manual updated on website
Date:   Sun, 27 Nov 2022 16:40:02 -0800
> The problem is we were using the query pattern "td.printindex-index-entry a"
> which gives us URLS of the form
> "Texinfo-File-Header.html#index-Beginning-line-of-a-Texinfo-file".
> That loads the right page, but it doesn't match what is in the ToC, used to
> generate the sidebar.
>
> Instead we need to use "td.printindex-index-section a" which gives us
> URLs of the form "Texinfo-File-Header.html#First-Line".

I can't remember if it worked at the time.  But now it's a bug that
we'll have to fix.