Chinese index sorting in PDF using Flare

[wangmeisong]

Hi Guys,
I have one question about Chinese index sorting in PDF output. Source files are htm, and index item were written as keyword in htm (such as attached screenshot htm_keyword.png).
But, index orders for Chinese are wrong, please see attached PDF_Index_Sort.png. How to sort Chinese index as phonetic in Madcap Flare? Thanks in advance.

[alt_jennifer]

Hello!

Well there is a way to change the sort order for the index keywords, but in your screenshot it looks like you want to change the order of the "alphabetical" headers. Like in English, if you wanted to change A, B, C, D, E to A, B, E, D, C? As far as I know, there's no way to do that in Flare.

Now, if you want to change the sort order for the keywords themselves, you can do that using an Index Link Set. It's commonly used for See Also links in the index, but can be used for "Sort as" commands. In English, for instance, if you had "The End" and wanted it to sort as just "End", you could set up a Sort As link here. This MadCap Online Help page has info on setting up an index link set: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... ight=index sort order

But of course, if you have to do it to a lot of index keywords, it would be a huge manual job to enter all of them yourself. However, I have heard of a neat workaround. When you import a Flare project into Lingo, it takes all the index keywords and makes a file named Index.liindexmap. Someone familiar with editing XML code could take that liindexmap file and transform it into a valid Index Link Set (with just the right search/replaces). Then all the original index keywords would be there, and you would just need a linguist to enter the appropriate sort key to get the right results.

I hope this helps!

[wangmeisong]

Hello!
Well there is a way to change the sort order for the index keywords, but in your screenshot it looks like you want to change the order of the "alphabetical" headers. Like in English, if you wanted to change A, B, C, D, E to A, B, E, D, C? As far as I know, there's no way to do that in Flare.
Now, if you want to change the sort order for the keywords themselves, you can do that using an Index Link Set. It's commonly used for See Also links in the index, but can be used for "Sort as" commands. In English, for instance, if you had "The End" and wanted it to sort as just "End", you could set up a Sort As link here. This MadCap Online Help page has info on setting up an index link set: http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... ight=index sort order
But of course, if you have to do it to a lot of index keywords, it would be a huge manual job to enter all of them yourself. However, I have heard of a neat workaround. When you import a Flare project into Lingo, it takes all the index keywords and makes a file named Index.liindexmap. Someone familiar with editing XML code could take that liindexmap file and transform it into a valid Index Link Set (with just the right search/replaces). Then all the original index keywords would be there, and you would just need a linguist to enter the appropriate sort key to get the right results.
I hope this helps!

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks very much. Yes, I want to change the order of Chinese "alphabetical" headers, but not just the order.
As default, Chinese index could be sorted as alphabetical in PDF using Flare, but couldn't be moved to corresponding alphabetical character automatically. Such as "安装"(anzhuang) should be under "A". Could Madcap Flare sort the order the index as Chinese alphabetical and move to corresponding alphabetical character automatically? Thanks.

[alt_jennifer]

Well, like I said they can't move the blue headers automatically. If those need to be rearranged, the only thing you can do at this point is manually recreate the index in a topic, and that's just a terrible task to attempt!

If you want to move an index keyword to a new blue header, you can do that by using the Index Link Set I was talking about. For example, with that word you were talking about, you could set up an entry in the Index Link Set that lists "安装" as the Keyword. You would select "Sort As" as the type of link you want, and then fill in something like "A安装" to move it to the blue header "A". Of course, I don't know whether it would be in the right order compared to the other keywords there, so you might have to change that second phrase a bit to get it in the right spot. Maybe you could transliterate it instead, "Anzhuang".

I hope that helps -- there are not a lot of options in Flare yet for customizing sort order or alphabetical order, but I'm sure that if we submit Feature Requests, they will work on the issues for a future release!

[wangmeisong]

Jennifer,
Thanks so much for your relpy.

[jasonsmith]

This has already been discussed in anothe topic, and I think the sort as feature is the way to go.
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... =13&t=7447