RE: Getting indexes?

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc at cu-portland dot edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Lee Green [mailto:eric@badtux.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2000 8:43 PM
> To: Gregory Leblanc; docbook-tools-discuss@sourceware.cygnus.com
> Subject: RE: Getting indexes?
> 
[snip]
> 
> I'm still ambivalent about the whole Docbook thing. It seems 
> powerful enough,
> but nobody seems to have really put together things so that 
> they're easy to use
> for mere mortals (I can write scripts in my sleep, but that 
> ain't gonna work
> for our technical documentation team!).  On the other hand, 
> the HTML output
> looks pretty decent compared to the output of LaTeX2HTML, 
> which is my current
> method of getting HTML out of structured markup...  On the 
> other hand, I can
> use LyX for writing LaTeX code... hmm... do any of the XML 
> editors work similar
> to LyX? How do Docbook and XML get along? 

Well, recomendations on SGML just went out to the LSB this week (err, maybe
before the weekend, I forget).  Hopefully those will get things a bit more
standardized.  I don't use the output from my stuff too often, so I'm not
sure how to resolve those issues.  You can use LyX and export to Docbook,
but I'm not sure how that works.  I just noticed that DocBook 4.0 is
official, guess it's time to move to XML.  (As of DB4, XML is official)  

I have to agree that the tools that do exist aren't very well put together
to get you up and running (although with a bit of work, it's do-able).
What's a MUCH bigger concern to me is the lack of tools to do anything
except process the DocBook source into other formats.  What about using
DocBook to enhance searches?  How about and OO database?  What about
indexing the document into a larger collection?  I don't see any tools for
these yet.  I've got some ideas about how do to a couple of those, but
they're kinda slow in taking shape.
	Greg