🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3478@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> dhosek@jarthur.UUCP (D.A. Hosek) writes:
>You may want to look at the makeindex program (available from 
>berkeley.edu by FTP, I believe) which is more or less "official".
>(it's co-written by Leslie Lamport and Pehong Chen in C with 
>dialectical versions for Unix, VMS, Microsoft C, and Waterloo C
>on VM/CMS. Someday, it is hoped that it will be translated into
>WEB, but that will take somebody's time and effort).
>

It is not too conflicting, because one was supposed to work for TeX and
the other was for LaTeX, although, I believe, the time spent on developing
a TeX makeindex could have very well been used to develop a macro file
which can make LaTeX makeindex understand indicies inserted in TeX.
As I saw, however, the one created for TeX seems to use more stuffs from
Scribe (as Scribe was heavily used at CMU just like at Pitt).

Richard Stallman of GnuEmacs pointed out that a major weakness of TeX is
that it does not know how to sort indices, which is quite true. Otherwise
why should people develop makeindex. This makes feel very strange. Sorting
strings is the simplest thing to do in programming a text formatter,
maybe Knuth has it in TeX 3.0?

No matter it is internal or external, we will survive. Nevertheless, life
can still be improved. It is why I wrote the indexor which can be ftped
from june.cs.washington.edu as indexor.tar.Z for UNIX (including BSD,
V7, Ultrix, V), VMS, and DOS. This was originally developed for Scribe.
Thus, it ought not be something like makeindex. It is actually a specially
purpose screen editor for you to browse through the manuscript word by
word, line by line, character by character or page by page. You can mark
the phrase if it needs to be indexed, and then press a key to produce
an index command. It has proved to be very useful in writing a long book
or manual. It can be configurated to compile to work on LaTeX or Scribe.

JB Wang