sed & awk, 2nd Edition

Output Format

One thing I wanted to do that our previous program did not do is generate an index without the troff codes. masterindex has three output modes: troff, screen, and page.

The default output is intended for processing by troff (via fmt). It contains macros that are defined in /work/macros/current/indexmacs. These macros should produce the same index format as before, which was largely done directly through troff requests. Here are a few lines off the top:

$ masterindex ch01
.so /work/macros/current/indexmacs
.Se "" "Index"
.XC
.XF A "A"
.XF 1 "applications, structure of  2;  program  1"
.XF 1 "attribute, WIN_CONSUME_KBD_EVENTS  13"
.XF 2 "WIN_CONSUME_PICK_EVENTS  13"
.XF 2 "WIN_NOTIFY_EVENT_PROC  13"
.XF 2 "XV_ERROR_PROC  14"
.XF 2 "XV_INIT_ARGC_PTR_ARGV  5,6"

The top two lines should be obvious. The .XC macro produces multicolumn output. (It will print out two columns for smaller books. It’s not smart enough to take arguments specifying the width of columns, but that should be done.) The .XF macro has three possible values for its first argument. An “A” indicates that the second argument is a letter of the alphabet that should be output as a divider. A “1” indicates that the second argument contains a primary entry. A “2” indicates that the entry begins with a secondary entry, which is indented.

When invoked with the -s argument, the program prepares the index for viewing on the screen (or printing as an ASCII file). Again, here are a few lines:

$ masterindex -s ch01 A applications, ...