Colons in Index Terms

[bzebian]

Is there any way to delimit a colon in an indexterm marker so that it doesn't create a sub-term in the index, but displays as an actual colon? Yahoo DITA Users group says use \: but that doesn't seem to work.

This is with the pdf3 output type in XmetaL 5.1

[Su-Laine Yeo]

Hi Bob,

As far as I can tell, this is an Open Toolkit issue and is not specific to XMetaL. I'm surprised that nobody has reported it before.

I've logged a bug here against the Open Toolkit: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2879196&group_id=132728&atid=725074

As a primitive workaround, depending on what font you are using in your PDF index you might be able to use another character that looks like a colon. Here is one that should work in a few fonts: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/05c3/browsertest.htm

Regards,
Su-Laine

[Su-Laine Yeo]

Derek found this old thread in which someone posted a creative workaround for the bug: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/message/9598

[bzebian]

Thanks. Will give them a test.

[bzebian]

I've found that if I type the term in the Sort As box in the Insert Index Marker dialog, it does not break at the colon in PDF output. For example, <indexterm>Connect:Direct<index-sort-as>Connect:Direct</index-sort-as></indexterm>

prints correctly in the index as Connect:Direct. That may be easiest for the writers to handle.

But I find that doesn't work with commas. The only thing I've found so far that works for commas is to insert the indexterm from the element list rather than through the 5.1 GUI.

<indexterm>index, item</indexterm>

Also, looks like when you use Sort As with EclipseHelp output, it outputs the term twice. We disable the index tag in Eclipse output, so this is not a big deal.