Re: Texindex: Leave out \initial{x} if there's only one

[Zack Weinberg]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 08:34:21PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> 
>     This happens, for instance, in the GNU CPP manual's index of
>     directives, where all the entries begin with '#'.
> 
> Hmm, I think it would be actually be good to fix the cpp manual to omit
> the leading # so the alphabetization could have a better effect.  As the
> Autoconf and Texinfo and probably other manuals do.

I tried that; it looks even sillier.  The index of directives is very
short:

#assert..............45       #include........................ 7
#define..............12       #include_next...................11
#elif................36       #line...........................37
#else................35       #pragma GCC dependency..........39
#endif...............33       #pragma GCC poison..............39
#error...............37       #pragma GCC system_header....12,40
#ident...............40       #sccs...........................40
#if..................33       #unassert.......................46
#ifdef...............33       #undef..........................25
#ifndef..............33       #warning........................37
#import..............46

If you split this up by initial letter ignoring the #, you get nine
categories, five of which have just one entry.  I think that's even
more distracting than just '#' at the beginning.

zw