14 Generación de índices

To find a topic of interest in a large document, book, or reference work, you usually turn to the table of contents or, more often, to the index. Therefore, an index is a very important part of a document, and most users’ entry point to a source of information is precisely through a pointer in the index. You should, therefore, plan an index and develop it along with the main text [40]. For reasons of consistency, it is beneficial, with the technique discussed below, to use special commands in the text to always print a given keyword in the same way in the text and the index throughout the whole document.

This chapter first reviews the basic indexing commands provided by standard LaTEX and explains which tools are available to help you build a well-thought-out index. The LATEX Manual does not contain a lot of information about the syntax of the entries. However, several articles in TUGboat deal with the question of generating an index with TEX or LaTEX. The syntax described in Section 14.1 is the one recognized by MakeIndex [39, 105] and the other indexing programs we discuss: upmendex, xindy, and xindex.

Section 14.2 describes how the MakeIndex processor is used. The interpretation of the input file and the format of the output file are controlled by style parameters. Section 14.2.4 lists these parameters and gives several simple examples to show how changing them influences the typeset result.

Section 14.3 presents upmendex, an Unicode-aware extension to MakeIndex. It is preferable to use this program whenever you have non–English documents or other special demands, such as the production of technical indexes.