DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: Sorting and non-en_US indexes

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

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/ David Cramer <dcramer@broadjump.com> was heard to say:
| We're going to have some DocBook documents localized in a number of
| languages and generate html, html help, and pdfs using an xsl-based
| toolchain. Running some basic tests with a Japanese document, things
| generally work ok for all formats, but I haven't tested an
| autoidx.xsl-generated index yet. Some posts make me think that sorting
| of non-English indexes might be a problem:

There's a really nasty, basically insoluble problem with I18N support
in autoidx.xsl. Let's take a look...

First, we need a key:

<xsl:key name="letter"
         match="indexterm"
         use="translate(substring(&primary;, 1, 1),&lowercase;,&uppercase;)"/>

Now, I've used entities here as a typing shortcut, but what I really
want is an XSLT variable so that I can override these settings easily.

But XSLT 1.0 doesn't allow variable references in xsl:key declarations.

So I'd have to redefine the entity values.

But XSLT Processors don't provide any hooks to do that at run time.

So I'm stuck.

One answer, maybe the only answer, is to create "autoidx-{af,ca,cs,da,...}.xsl"
files and corresponding "docbook-{af,ca,cs,da,...}.xsl" drivers to include them.

What a pity.

Can anyone think of a better solution?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Wisdom is only a comparative
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | quality, it will not bear a single
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | definition.--Marquess of Halifax
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