On Saturday 19 July 2008 12:13:25 pm John Culleton wrote:

I discovered an old file in the texsis distribution called index.tex. Unlike eplain.tex it doesn't cause problems when used with Context. It creates the book.idx file required by makeindex. Now the full range of features of makeindex are available to Context users. The only change needed is trivial, in every \index statement change the + sign to ! and of course run makeindex between Context runs. This solution is simple enough and adds enough power to Context that I suggest it be incorporated into the texexec program. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of eplain but it has enough to produce a professional index. And since that is part of my business I welcome it.

For a book named book.tex here is all that is required today:

\input index.tex %This overwrites the Context \index macro .... \index{main item!secondary item} %two level item ... \idx{resorted item@``resorted item''} %prints index item in quotes

... \input book.ind %prints index

For that last line I substituted: ------------------------------------------ \title{Index} \writetolist[chapter]{}{Index} \tfx \startcolumns[n=2] \typefile{book.ind} \stopcolumns ---------------------------------------- And the makeindex command I use is makeindex -s alpha.ist book.idx The alpha.ist file adjusts the default output of makeindex. The file I use is here: http://wexfordpress.com/tex/alpha.ist Now I have a satisfactory index. I changed all the + to ! in the \index cammands as mentioned before. But it is possible to modify makeindex still further with an addition to alpha.ist: -------------------------------- level + -------------------------------- -- John Culleton Resources for every author and publisher: http://wexfordpress.com/tex/shortlist.pdf http://wexfordpress.com/tex/packagers.pdf http://www.creativemindspress.com/newbiefaq.htm http://www.gropenassoc.com/TopLevelPages/reference%20desk.htm