Ubuntu Manpage: hxindex - insert an index into an HTML document

NAME

       hxindex - insert an index into an HTML document

SYNOPSIS

       hxindex  [ -t ] [ -x ] [ -n ] [ -f ] [ -r ] [ -c classes ] [ -b base ] [ -i indexdb ] [ -s
       template ] [ -u phrase ] [--] [ file-or-URL ]

DESCRIPTION

       The hxindex looks for terms to be indexed in a document, collects them,  turns  them  into
       target  anchors and creates a sorted index as an HTML list, which is inserted at the place
       of a placeholder in the document. The resulting document is written to standard output.

       The index is inserted at the place of a comment of the form

           <!--index-->

       or between two comments of the form

           <!--begin-index-->
           ...
           <!--end-index-->

       In the latter case, all existing content between the two comments is removed first.

       Index terms are either elements of type <dfn>  or  elements  with  a  class  attribute  of
       "index".  (For  backward compatibility, also class attributes "index-inst" and "index-def"
       are recognized.) <dfn> elements (and class "index-def") are considered more important than
       elements with class "index" and will appear in bold in the generated index.

       The option -c adds additional classes, that are aliases for "index".

       By  default,  the  contents  of  the  element  are  taken as the index term.  Here are two
       examples of occurrences of the index term "shoe":

           A <dfn>shoe</dfn> is a piece of clothing that...
           completed by a leather <span class="index">shoe</span>...

       If the term to be indexed is not equal to the contents of the element, the title attribute
       can be used to give the correct term:

           ... <dfn title="shoe">Shoes</dfn> are pieces of clothing that...
           ... with two leather <span class="index" title="shoe">shoes</span>...

       The  title  attribute  must  also  be  used  when  the index term is a subterm of another.
       Subterms appear indented in the index, under their head term. To define a subterm,  use  a
       title  attribute  with two exclamation marks ("!!") between the term and the subterm, like
       this:

           <dfn title="shoe!!leather">...</dfn>
           <dfn title="shoe!!invention of">...</dfn>
           <em class="index" title="shoe!!protective!!steel nosed">...</em>

       As the last example above shows, there can be multiple levels of sub-subterms.

       The title attribute also allows multiple index  terms  to  be  associated  with  a  single
       occurrence.  The  multiple  terms  are  separated  with  a vertical bar ("|"). Compare the
       following examples with the ones above:

           <dfn title="shoe|boot">...</dfn>
           <dfn title="shoe!!invention of|inventions!!shoe">...</dfn>

       These two elements both insert two terms into the index.  Note  that  the  second  example
       above combines subterms and multiple terms.

       It  is  possible  to run index on a file that already has an index. The old target anchors
       and the old index will be removed before being re-generated.

OPTIONS

The following options are supported:

-t By default, hxindex adds an ID attribute to the element that contains the
occurrence of a term and also inserts an <a> element inside it with a name
attribute equal to the ID. This is to allow old browsers that ignore ID
attributes, such as Netscape 4, to find the target as well. The -t option
suppresses the <a> element.

-x This option turns on XML syntax conventions: empty elements will end in />
instead of > as in HTML. -x implies -t.

-i indexdb
hxindex can read an initial index from a file and write the merged collection of
index terms back to that file. This allows an index to span several documents.
The -i option is used to give the name of the file that contains the index.

-b base This option is useful in combination with -i to give the base URL reference of
the document. By default, hxindex will store links to occurrences in the indexdb
file in the form #anchor, but when -b is given, the links will look like
base#anchor instead.

When used in combination with -n, the title attributes of the links will contain
the title of the document that contains the term. The title is inserted before
the template (see option -s) and separated from it with a comma and a space.
E.g., if hxindex is called with

hxindex -i termdb -n -base myfile.html myfile.html

and the termdb already contains an entry for "foo" in in section "3.1" of a
document called "file2.html" with title "The foos", then the generated index
will contain an entry such as this:

foo, <a href="file2.html#foo"
title="The foos, section 3.1">3.1</a>

-c class[,class[,...]]
Normal index terms are recognized because they have a class of "index". The -c
option adds additional, comma-separated class names that will be considered
aliases for "index". E.g., -c instance will make sure that <span
class="instance">term</span> is recognized as a term for the index.

-n By default, the index consists of links with "#" as the anchor text. Option -n
causes the link text to consist of the section numbers of the sections in which
the terms occur, falling back to "without number" (see option -u below) if no
section number could be found. Section numbers are found by looking for the
nearest preceding start tag with a class of "secno" or "no-num". In the case of
"secno", the contents of that element are taken as the section number. In the
case of "no-num" the section is assumed to have no number and hxindex will print
"without number" instead. These classes are also used by hxnum(1), so it is
useful to run hxindex after hxnum, e.g.,

hxnum myfile.html | hxindex -n >mynewfile.html

-s template
When option -n is used, the link will have a title attribute and the template
determines what it contains. The default is "section %s", where the %s is a
placeholder for the section number. In other words, the index will contain
entries like this:

term, <a href="#term" title="section 7.8">7.8</a>

Some examples:

hxindex -n -s 'chapter %s'
hxindex -n -s 'part %s'
hxindex -n -s 'hoofdstuk %s' -u 'zonder nummer'

This option is only useful in combination with -n

-u phrase When option -n is used to display section numbers, references for which no
section number can be found are shown as phrase instead. The default is "??".

This option is only useful in combination with -n

-f Remove title attributes that were used for the index as well as the comments
that delimit the inserted index. This avoids that browsers display these
attributes. Note that hxindex cannot be run again on its own output if this
option is used. (Mnemonic: "freeze" or "final".)

-r Do not ignore trailing punctuation when sorting index terms. E.g., if two terms
are written as

hxindex will normally ignore the comma and treat them as the same term, but with
-r, they are treated as different. This affects trailing commas (,), semicolons
(;), colons (:), exclamations mark (!), question marks (?) and full stops (.).
A final full stop is never ignored if there are two or more in the term, to
protect abbreviations ("B.C.") and ellipsis ("more..."). This does not affect
how the index term is printed (it is always printed as it appears in the text),
only how it is compared to similar terms. (Mnemonic: "raw".)

OPERANDS

       The following operand is supported:

       file-or-URL
                 The name of an HTML or XML file or the URL of one. If absent, or if the file  is
                 "-", standard input is read instead.

EXIT STATUS

       The following exit values are returned:

       0         Successful completion.

       >0        An error occurred in parsing the HTML file.

ENVIRONMENT

       The  input  is  assumed  to  be  in UTF-8, but the current locale is used to determine the
       sorting order of the  index  terms.  I.e.,  hxindex  looks  at  the  LANG,  LC_ALL  and/or
       LC_COLLATE environment variables. See locale(1).

       To  use  a  proxy  to  retrieve  remote files, set the environment variables http_proxy or
       ftp_proxy.  E.g., http_proxy="http://localhost:8080/"

BUGS

       Assumes UTF-8 as input. Doesn't expand character entities (apart from the  standard  ones:
       "&amp;",  "&lt;",  "&gt"  and "&quot"). Instead, pipe the input through hxunent(1) and, if
       needed, asc2xml(1) to convert it to UTF-8.

       Remote files (specified with a URL) are  currently  only  supported  for  HTTP.  Password-
       protected files or files that depend on HTTP "cookies" are not handled. (You can use tools
       such as curl(1) or wget(1) to retrieve such files.)

       The accessibility of an index, even when generated with option -n, is poor.