Automatic index keyword separators please!

Nothing is perfect! This is where you can post your ideas and wishes for functions you'd like to see in Help & Manual. Current version only please (H&M7).

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

Post Reply
Kate Jones
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Nov 17, 2015 1:47 pm
Location: St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK

Automatic index keyword separators please!

Unread post by Kate Jones »

I've already raised this once, some time ago here, but thought I'd bring it up again.

We publish the majority of our user's guides and all of our programmer's guides to PDF only. We always supply a keyword index for the European languages we support, but can't currently do this for Chinese, Korean or Japanese. We don't particularly like removing functionality from a document just because our compiler software can't handle these languages, but apparently the nearest thing to a solution is to give up and omit the index entirely.

I've just tried to create a keyword index for a Korean document, as Hangul is a very different system from Chinese or Japanese, being much closer to a Western-style alphabet. It hasn't worked, as you can see from the attached files. This is presumably because the software hasn't recognised the connection between the syllable characters and the individual "letters" that I've entered as keyword separators.

It would be really useful if the template could pick up on the language defined in the Help and Manual file and populate the list of keyword separators accordingly. Are there any plans to introduce this feature?

Best wishes,

Kate
korean-keyword-index-1.png
korean-keyword-index-2.png
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
User avatar
Alexander Halser
EC-Software Support
Posts: 4098
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 7:24 pm
Location: Salzburg, Austria
Contact:

Re: Automatic index keyword separators please!

Unread post by Alexander Halser »

Hi Kate,

Would you mind to send me a test project (in Korean language) including the MNL template file that you use for PDF?
Please send it to alexander.halser (at) ec-software.com.

The keyword index is sorted by a Windows function that uses the language of your project as the sort algorithm. The list of keyword index separators is a hard-coded string list. It should be in the sort order of the keywords. The rest is simple math: separators are compared to keywords and if a new keyword ranks "higher" in the list than the next separator, the separator is printed before the keyword.
Alexander Halser
Senior Software Architect, EC Software GmbH
Kate Jones
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Nov 17, 2015 1:47 pm
Location: St Neots, Cambridgeshire, UK

Re: Automatic index keyword separators please!

Unread post by Kate Jones »

Thanks for your help, Alexander – I'm very glad that the main problem with the Korean file was that I'd put the Hangul separators before the Roman ones rather than after them.

I still think it would be helpful, though, if it were possible to automatically generate a list of separators, using the language defined in the Help & Manual project.
Post Reply