Re: texinfo 6.0 texindex problem?

[Aharon Robbins]

Hi.  THanks for the mail. I moved to current development code for
texindex and braces are working. I note that hyphens and < signs
also get removed from the key for the index.  Is that on purpose?

I can go ahead and add @sortas, but I'm wondering if I need to do
that also for the hyphen and the < sign?

Thanks,

Arnold

> Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2015 21:08:11 +0100
> Subject: Re: texinfo 6.0 texindex problem?
> From: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
> To: Aharon Robbins <address@hidden>
> Cc: Texinfo <address@hidden>
>
> On 8 October 2015 at 20:06, Aharon Robbins <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Hi.
> >
> > I added
> >
> > @tex
> > \global\usebracesinindexestrue
> > @end tex
> >
> > to gawktexi.in in the gawk dist and built a pdf with the tools from
> > texinfo 6.0.  Something's weird.  First, there is no initial for \.
> > Second, braces come out under backslash.
> >
> > Did I do something wrong?  Index files attached.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Arnold
>
> It appears that the texinfo.tex version from Texinfo 6.0 is not the
> one that's being used here, but one more recent. However, the version
> of texindex being used likely is the one from Texinfo 6.0. If you used
> the current development version of texindex (or possibly the texindex
> from an earlier release than 6.0), then I expect the braces coming out
> under backslash problem would be resolved.
>
> The lack of initial for \ is expected. This is due to a change in
> index sorting where backslash is ignored for the purposes of
> generating a sort key, along with a few non-alphabetic characters. So
> many manuals have indexed items starting with a backslash that are
> better indexed under a letter following the backslash (an example from
> Texinfo's manual is \mathopsup, better indexed under "M"). Admittedly,
> sometimes a backslash on it's own is indexed (I see the gawk manual
> has many occurrences of this), but this is likely the rarer case.
> There is a new syntax for specifying an explicit sort key that was
> introduced after the Texinfo 6.0 release. It looks like
>
> @cindex @sortas{\ escape sequence} \ (backslash), escape sequence
>
> Here "\ (backslash), escape sequence" is the text that will be output
> in the index, and "\ escape sequence" is the sort key.
>