Re: Feature request: multilevel indexing for TeX

[Gavin Smith]

On 3/3/19, Gavin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> I went looking for past emails about the reasoning behind the choices
> of escape char but found nothing. Did you look into this when you
> wrote texindex?

Karl wanted the escape character to change for index files:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2014-02/msg00052.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2015-08/msg00162.html

As far as I know the only barrier to changing the escape character is
that old texindex is still installed.

At some point it would be good if texindex could be made faster -
possibly rewritten in a faster language than awk (or if awk itself
could be made faster) (go? haskell? although Texinfo may have too many
languages in it already). If C texindex is /usr/bin/texindex then
running

TEXINDEX=/usr/bin/texindex texi2pdf texinfo.texi

noticeably reduces the delay between runs of TeX (by a second or so)
(where texinfo.texi is Texinfo's own manual). It doesn't matter very
much of course, as TeX itself takes much longer to run than texindex
for large input files.