Thursday, December 3, 2015

Declarative Index Proposal for Printing with CSS

This proposal is about formatting an index with HTML and CSS. It’s something you can’t do today in a standard, cross-implementation way.

The part you can’t do today is getting the lists of page numbers right. The same problem occurs in an index and in cross references. There are vendor extensions to do it, but they are not compatible, so it’s a good candidate for standardization.

A back of the book index looks like this:


Web History and SoftQuad HoTMetaL

 Years ago, starting in 1989, i worked at SoftQuad Inc. in Toronto. I got there because SoftQuad sold a text formatter based on troff (sqtr...