index support for publishing

[Stefan Vollmar <vollmar@nf.mpg.de>]

Hallo,

we have been using org-mode to create HTML output for several projects and this has worked so well that we want to change some of our software documentation from LaTeX to org. In this recent example, http://www.nf.mpg.de/vhist/usage.html, we are happy with the result (we still use too many macros and will provide the org-source when we have cleaned it up a bit; I really like the tables with alternating row styles). 

However, this is already plenty of content for one single HTML document. We are now looking for a good strategy on how to split content into multiple org-files that can then be used to create multiple, linked HTML files for another, more complex documentation project.

With "Publishing", http://orgmode.org/manual/Publishing.html, org-mode already has a lot of support for this. What is missing, from our point of view, is support for one (optional) index file.

Here is a suggestion:

(1) 

* My Section
  :INDEX: Special Section Name
  Some contents...

* Another Section
  :INDEX:
  more contents...

(2) During publishing, for each org-file a corresponding .orgx file could be written, containing one line for each INDEX line:

[[org-link to corresponding section in org-file][desc]]

where <desc> defaults to the section name but is the argument after :INDEX: if provided.	 

(3) The index could then be generated by reading all .orgx-files, sorting the <desc> parts of the links and generating a simple list of sorted links. This might prove useful for LaTeX, but would definetely be interesting for HTML output. We could manage this on our own, provided we get some help with (2). Generating the index file is probably pretty fast, so in (2) one could do this "on-the-fly", however, I have a feeling that pulling meta information from org-files in corresponding files might prove useful for all sorts of post-processing later.

Warm regards,
 Stefan
-- 
Dr. Stefan Vollmar, Dipl.-Phys.
Max-Planck-Institut für neurologische Forschung
Gleuelerstr. 50, 50931 Köln, Germany
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Email: vollmar@nf.mpg.de   http://www.nf.mpg.de