diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/user/str_indx')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/user/str_indx | 25 |
1 files changed, 13 insertions, 12 deletions
diff --git a/doc/user/str_indx b/doc/user/str_indx index 3c15c09..b75c8db 100644 --- a/doc/user/str_indx +++ b/doc/user/str_indx @@ -40,14 +40,15 @@ automatically. The object preceding the @Code "@Index" symbol is a compulsory key which is used for sorting the index entries, @FootNote { -The collating sequence used to decide what comes after what is the -collating sequence used by the @Code "memcmp()" library routine (just -the underlying binary character codes). Alternatively, the version -of Lout installed on your system may use the @Code "strcoll()" -collating sequence, which understands accented characters and whose -effect depends on your locale. To find out whether @Code "strcoll()" -is in use or not, type @Code "lout -V" which prints out several lines -of this and similar information. +The collating sequence used to decide what comes after what is either +the collating sequence used by the @Code "memcmp()" library routine (just +the underlying binary character codes), or else the one used by the +@Code "strcoll()" collating sequence, which understands accented +characters and whose effect depends on your locale. To find out +whether @Code "strcoll()" is in use or not, type @Code "lout -V" which +prints out several lines of this and similar information, including +information about command line flags to switch between the two kinds of +collation. @PP If the sorting you get turns out to be not what you expected, the first thing to try is the replacement of all accented letters in index @@ -55,10 +56,10 @@ keys by unaccented ones. Sorting is quite an intractable problem: even if @Code "strcoll()" gets the sorting right for one language, there still remains the problem of sorting multilingual indexes. @PP -Lout's database mechanism assumes that the @I tab character is collated -before any character that could appear in a sorting key. It seems that -there are a few collating sequences in existence which do not satisfy this -condition, and in these cases Lout will fail to produce the correct index. +Older versions of Lout assumed that the @I tab character was collated +before any character that could appear in a sorting key, causing +problems when this was not so. Recent versions of Lout no longer +make this assumption. } but which is not itself printed anywhere. It is best to construct these sorting keys from lower-case letters and the . character only, beginning |