I'd like to announce version 1.1 of the indexing system `xindy'. xindy was developed to overcome the limitations of the `makeindex' system. If you have to process texts in your own language or you don't like to write actual keys anymore, xindy is the right tool for *you*! Check out xindy's official homepage http://www.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de/xindy or the ftp resources CTAN: ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/support/xindy ftp://ftp.th-darmstadt.de/pub/tex/src/xindy Below is a description of xindy's most important features: Internationalization: xindy can be configured to process indexes for many languages with different letter sets and different sorting rules. For example, many roman languages such as Italian, Portuguese or Spanish contain accented letters such as A', A`, n~ which often can't be processed by many index processors not talking about sorting them correctly into an index. The xindy-system can be configured to process these alphabets by defining sort- and merge-rules that allow expressing of language specific rules. One example of such a rule would be (sort-rule "ä" "ae") defining that a word containing the umlaut-a will be sorted as if it contained the letters "ae" instead. This is one form of how the umlaut-a is sorted into german indexes. With an appropriate set of rules one can express the complete rules of a specific language. User-definable Location Classes: Locations are the entities an index entry points to. Commonly used locations are page numbers, section numbers, etc. xindy allows to define new kinds of types to be composed of smaller entities like arabic numbers, roman numerals, letters, etc. which can be used to describe new location classes. Examples of these entities appear in books that have a page numbering scheme that starts from 1 for each new chapter resulting in page numbers of the form 1-13, 2-15, 2-20, etc. This type of locations can often be found in computer manuals. A more complex structure is represented by the locations Psalm 46, 1-8 and Genesis 1, 31. Even the structure of bible verses can be described allowing xindy to correctly sort and process indexes for documents with a completely different structure. Highly Configurable Markup: Since an index processor is only one component in a document preparation system it ought to fit smoothly into the rest of the environment. Many document preparation systems use the concept of environments that can be used to describe the markup of the text entities. Our approach is based on this concept which has proven to be expressive enough for most applications. Systems such as TeX, SGML and its instance HTML, GNU Info, RTF and the Nroff-familiy of document formatters operate with environments. The markup of an index can be defined for all of these systems in a very comfortable though extremly powerful way. xindy comes with a context-based markup strategy that uses a form of event dispatching mechanism (sounds cool, eh? It is!) -- ====================================================================== Roger Kehr kehr@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de Computer Science Department Technical University of Darmstadt