How can I make an index? about pollen-users HOT 2 OPEN

Pollen has no built-in facilities for building a keyword index for HTML; each author must design and implement their own system. It's quite an exercise. (Obviously, if you’re only targeting PDF via LaTeX, you can just use LaTeX’s system for this)

I have written a pretty good one for an upcoming project. Here’s an example of the output. It supports sub-entries using ! as a separator, with the idea that it will plug into LaTeX pretty easily if I need it to.

Roughly:

• In HTML, my ◊index tag function calls html-index, which produces a link to the keyword index page with a custom attribute data-index-entry as a kind of marker so it can be found again in the next step.
• My site uses a SQLite database to cache a bunch of stuff about each article each time it is rendered. (I decided to have a bit of fun and call this “crystalization”) As part of this process, the crystalize-index-entries! function is called, which finds all links with a data-index-entry attribute, and saves info about them into the keywordindex table of the database.
• The program which generates the index is keyword-index.rkt.
• Because each article also has its own row in the database, I can use the rowid column to simulate page numbers in the output.

A few years ago I prototyped another system which was much simpler. See these lines in pollen.rkt and the template file that produced the keyword index page. It didn't support sub-entries and also did not use a SQLite database; it just loaded the doc of each file in a given pagetree looking for index entries. The upside of using a database is that it is faster.

from pollen-users.

Hi!

Thank you for your help!

The example of the output for your upcoming project is really beautiful, unfortunatly I am a newbie and didn't understand very well how to do this... Maybe in the future (=

Pollen is awesome!

from pollen-users.