| Ted Pavlic 2008-03-30, 11:42 pm |
| > In my oponion it is an error that makeindex is sensitive to those extra
> spaces and line breaks, which is the reason I use xindy (that is
> texindy), which does not suffor from this problem. Memoir writes to the
> idx file in the same manner as the normal classes.
I would really like to use xindy, but several authors contribute to
this particular document (via Mercurial, actually, which is another
interesting topic). Operating systems (and technical comfort level)
varies across the set of authors, and so I've wanted to stick to
makeindex, which has strong support and easy use on every platform.
> Though it is a bit interesting that the index package seems to be able
> to remove extra spaces like you mentioned before.
Evidently, it has to do with a recent change to memoir. index writes
to the AUX file, and then the AUX changes write to the IDX. Memoir, on
the other hand, writes DIRECTLY to the IDX.
As discussed in memoir's documentation (and the addendum), writing
directly to the IDX makes using packages like natbib a little more
difficult (i.e., order of things matters more). However, it speeds
things up (one less tex run). However, that extra level of abstraction
tends to also get rid of those spaces.
This whole subject has made me much more aware of the difficulties in
putting together an inclusive class like memoir. It's impressive that
its author (Peter Wilson) has been able to come up with such a useful
compromise.
Hopefully I'll be able to use the other posts in this thread to give
me an idea about how to patch *memoir* so I can use its indexing
directly. (In another message on this thread, I comment on why I need
line breaks in the source)
Thanks!
--Ted
|