[Vimoutliner] Vorst dead end analysis

[Steve Litt]

On Saturday 20 October 2007 03:26, Stefan Schmiedl wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:41:12 -0400
>
> Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> > On Friday 19 October 2007 10:56, Stefan Schmiedl wrote:
> > > Steve Litt (2007-10-19 10:15):
> > > > Here are some things I think are going to be difficult (not
> > > > necessarily impossible, but difficult) in the VO to LaTeX converter:
> > > >
> > > > Indexing
> > > > Bibliography
> > > > Labels and crossreferences
> > > > Math
> > >
> > > I admit to not having followed the discussion, but why do you think
> > > these are problems?
> >
> > Let's take index entries, specifically the kind that extend over a lot of
> > text (the kind that has a pipe and an open paren). I see no way of doing
> > that except markup, and once you start putting markup in your outline,
> > its readability and usefulness rapidly declines.
>
> Last time I used indexing, it amounted to \index{whatever} and running
> makeindex (or whatever it's called) after a sufficiently high number of
> latex runs.

If it were just the \index{whatever} type of index, it wouldn't be so bad. But 
then you get into the \index{whatever|(} and the \index{whatever|)} stuff, 
which I use quite a bit, and things become quite ugly.

My main problem with indices is that in a fully indexed book, the markup is so 
voluminous and dense that it starts to obscure the content, making further 
editing difficult.

Interestingly, what might help a little while editing a fully indexed book is 
a program which first lists every \index{whatever} or \index{whatever|)} 
entry, sorts them, and assigns them to an array indexed by three letters. For 
instance \index{football|(} might have array index "aab" and 
\index{football|)} might have index "aac". Then, within the text, these 
entries could be replaced by the much less intrusive \iiaab and \iiaac.

When the author wants to look at his progress, he'd have a script with one 
extra step -- it would go through the doc replacing all \ii??? with their 
respective \index commands. This is a little like LyX's ability to put the 
\index commands in ERT (inline LaTeX) so their intrusiveness is limited. This 
would be a way for the author to edit an indexed document, keeping the 
indexing, but having the indexing get in the way a little less.

SteveT
 
Steve Litt
Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
http://www.troubleshooters.com/