Table of Contents
The contents of this section was taken from the HTML helppages for Make-Index of Norman Walsh (Version 1.0, 12 Apr 94).
Some obvious errors in this documentation have been corrected according to makeindex(1L).
Additional information was taken from makeindex(1L) and the program source files as found in teTeX 2.0.2.
Make-Index is a general purpose index processor. It takes one or more raw index files (normally generated by a formatter), sorts the entries, and produces the actual index file. It is not dependent on any particular format of raw index file, although the .idx file generated by LaTeX is the default. Up to three levels (0, 1, and 2) of subitem nesting within the same entry is supported. The input format may be redefined in a style file so that raw index or glossary output from other formatters may be processed. The style file also defines the style of output index file. Unless specified otherwise, the file name base of the first input file (idx0) is used to determine other related input/output files. The default input file type is .idx.
Make-Index is a Unix program, and therefore has a Unix-style command line. Instead of qualifiers delimited with a slash (/), Make-Index options are delimited with a hyphen (-).
Enable blank compression. By default every blank counts in the index key. The -c option ignores leading and trailing blanks and tabs and compresses intermediate ones to a single space.
Employ German word ordering in the index, in accord with rules set forth in DIN 5007. The quote character must be redefined in a style file (for example, redefine quote as '+'). If the quote character is not redefined, Make-Index will produce an error message and abort.
Use stdin as the input file. When this option is specified and the -o is not, output is written to stdout.
Quiet mode, send no messages to stderr. By default progress and error messages are sent to stderr as well as the transcript file. The -q option disables the stderr messages.
Disable implicit page range formation. By default three or more successive pages will be automatically abbreviated as a range (e.g. 1--5). The -r option disables it, making the explicit range operators the only way to create page ranges (see the Special Effects section below).
Take sty as the style file. There is no default for the style file name. The environment variable INDEXSTYLE defines the path where the style file should be found.
Take ind as the output index file. By default the file name base of the first input file idx0 concatenated with the extension .ind is used as the output file name.
Take log as the transcript file. By default the file name base of the first input file idx0 concatenated with the extension .ilg is used as the transcript file name.
Set the starting page number of the output index file to be no. This is useful when the index file is to be formatted separately. Other than pure numbers, three special cases are allowed for no: any, odd, and even. In these special cases, the starting page number is determined by retrieving the last page number from the source log file. The source log file name is determined by concatenating the file name base of the first raw index file (idx0) with the extension .log. The last source page is obtained by searching backward in the log file for the first instance of a number included in [...]. If a page number is missing or the log file is not found, no attempt will be made to set the starting page number. The meaning of each of these cases follows:
The starting page is the last source page number plus 1.
The starting page is the first odd page following the last source page number.
The starting page is the first even page following the last source page number.