Outputting an index

Outputting an index
	Chapter 18. Indexes

After adding your indexterms and an empty <index/> element to your document, you just have to process your document with one of the DocBook XSL stylesheets and you will get an index generated automatically. If for some reason you don't want to include an index in your output, then you can turn it off by setting the stylesheet parameter generate.index to zero.

Note

The default indexing does not handle accented characters properly. Characters such as a, à, and ä should sort together, but they do not. However, there is a customization that can provide such sorting. See the section “Internationalized indexes”.

When you generate an index for HTML output, you may notice these features.

Instead of page numbers (which don't exist in HTML), each link shows the title of the section that contained the indexterm. That gives the reader some context for the link.
If you have used titleabbrev elements to add optional short titles, you can have the stylesheets use the shorter title in the index by setting the index.prefer.titleabbrev parameter to 1 (it is zero by default).
The links go to the top of the section rather than to the anchor point within the section. That's done to permit multiple identical indexterms in the same section to collapse to a single entry. That's done to avoid having to repeat the section title.

When you generate an index for FO output, you may notice these features.

Identical entries on the same page will display multiple page references to the same page. It should display only one reference to that page.
Consecutive page numbers are not collapsed into a page range.

See the next section for a possible solution to these problems.


Specialized indexes		Cleaning up an FO index