Flare indexing sort order is wrong in Chinese?

[Diana_BB]

I just got the following message from one of my R&D VPs:

"I have been hearing from one of the localization companies here in China that they are having enormous problems with indexing within MadCap. Apparently the sort order is not correct in Chinese or any other double-byte language for that matter."

Is this true? If so, is there a fix coming?

One of our big customers is a Chinese company, so I'm guessing his comment to me means that we may need to translate there, too.

I'd appreciate any news about this--good news is better, so I don't have to fight to keep migrating everyone to Flare!
Thanks!
Diana

[forfear]

i'll check with our translator about this as well. We've moved 80% of all our English help/training projects into Chinese with Lingo

[jasonsmith]

I have encountered this problem too. Strangely, the order in which the index entries are listed is different when the project properties > Language is set to either simplified or traditional Chinese. Maybe one of them is correct and one isn't. At least it seems that there must be some kind of PDF compiler algorithm that could be tweaked to sort this out?

[jasonsmith]

Flare now supports the "index-sort-as" functionality. This is accomplished using an Index Link Set file (File > New > Index Link Set). Within this file, Index Keywords can be assigned an identifier that is used to determine their order in the printed index. Previously we had this problem when trying to generate a PinYin index for a Chinese translation. A provisional workflow will now be as follows:
1) Send project for translation (Index.liindexmap_XXXX.xlf is translated into Chinese)
2) Generate Index Link Set file (flixl) from the translated Index.liindexmap_XXXX.xlf file.
The fastest, most elegant and foolproof way to do this is using an .xsl transformation (I can post the XML if anyone is interested), otherwise you have to copy the entries from the Index window)
3) Either send the .flixl file for "translation" from Chinese to PinYin or use an online Chinese to PinYin converter to enter the PinYin "translations" direct into the Flare project.