[pmwiki-users] yet another documentation suggestion ...

[John Rankin]

On Wednesday, 3 August 2005 9:15 AM, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:

>Now that's a problem that you have with any large body of text. The 
>problem really isn't that PmWiki has no FAQ (actually the entire PmWiki 
>group is one, from a certain perspective); the problem is that searches 
>don't turn up the "most interesting" results first.

Yes! It seems to me that people use many techniques for finding
things in a large body of text, including a table of contents, an
index and a search. One issue I see is that the page index (list of
pages in alphabetical order) isn't very helpful in large page
collections, because the sort is not necessarily in a useful order.

What if we had an (:index text:) directive?

For example, the pages SimpleTables and AdvancedTables might
contain

(:index Tables, simple:) and (:index Tables, advanced:)

respectively. The resulting index would look like this:

T
Tables
   advanced
   simple

An elaboration could support links to anchors:

(:index Formatting, lists=list:)

would generate a link to PageName#list

It's probably easier to add index entries to a page than to
word it in a way that searches work better, as it's possible
for the same page to appear more than once in the index.

I see this as overkill for small page collections, but useful
for some large collections, especially documentation-style
collections like PmWiki.

Regards

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin