texindy(1)

📦 version 2026.0, in alpine 3.24

🌸 texindy — the LaTeX index glow-up 🌸

okay so bestie, this is the manual page for texindy, part of the xindy family (the manual name is texindy(1), if you were keeping score). Buckle up, it's a long one 💖

✨ NAME ✨

texindy — create a sorted and tagged index from a raw LaTeX index. that's it, that's the whole job, and it does it so well 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

 texindy [-V?h] [-qv] [-iglr] [-d magic] [-o outfile.ind] [-t log] \
         [-L lang] [-C codepage] [-M module] [idx0 idx1 ...]

🎀 GNU-Style Long Options for Short Options

like, every short flag has a long-form bestie, here's the whole squad:

 -V / --version
 -? / -h / --help
 -q / --quiet
 -v / --verbose
 -i / --stdin
 -g / --german
 -l / --letter-ordering
 -r / --no-ranges
 -d / --debug          (multiple times)
 -o / --out-file
 -t / --log-file
 -L / --language
 -C / --codepage
 -M / --module         (multiple times)
 -I / --input-markup   (supported: latex, xelatex, omega)

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so texindy is the LaTeX-specific command of xindy, the flexible indexing system. it takes a raw index as input and gives you back a merged, sorted and tagged index. the merging, sorting and tagging are all controlled by xindy modules, and don't worry — there's a convenient set of them already preloaded. slay ✨

files containing the raw index get passed as arguments. and if you pass no arguments at all? the raw index gets read from standard input instead. no cap 🫶

there's also a genuinely good intro-level writeup of texindy in the indexing chapter of the LaTeX Companion (2nd ed.) — highly recommend, it's giving required reading 📚

if you wanna produce an index for LaTeX documents that use special index markup, then honestly the xindy(1) command is probably more your vibe. just saying 👀

texindy is basically an approach that merges together:

  • support for the make-rules framework,
  • its own xindy modules (for stuff like special LaTeX commands inside the index),
  • and a reasonable level of MakeIndex compatibility.

iconic combo honestly 🔥

✨ OPTIONS ✨

  • --version / -V — prints out the version numbers of all the relevant components and then dips. exit stage left 💅
  • --help / -h / -? — outputs the usage message plus an explanation of the options. your little cheat sheet bestie 🎀
  • --quiet / -q — don't output progress messages. error messages only, periodt. 🤫
  • --verbose / -v — output verbose progress messages. she's chatty, we love her 💖
  • --debug magic / -d magic — output debug messages. you can pass this option multiple times. magic decides what actually gets output:
 magic          remark
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 script         internal progress messages of driver scripts
 keep_tmpfiles  don't discard temporary files
 markup         output markup trace, as explained in xindy manual
 level=n        log level, n is 0 (default), 1, 2, or 3

so like: script = the driver scripts narrating their internal progress, keep_tmpfiles = pls don't throw away the temp files, markup = spits out a markup trace exactly as explained in the xindy manual, and level=n = the log level where n is 0 (the default), 1, 2, or 3. 🌈

  • --out-file outfile.ind / -o outfile.ind — write the index to the file outfile.ind. if you don't pass this option, the output file's name is the base name of the first argument with the extension ind tacked on. ⚠️ and if the raw index is being read from standard input, this option is mandatory — no out-file, no output, no exceptions bestie 😭
  • --log-file log.ilg / -t log.ilg — write log messages to the file log.ilg. and heads up: these log messages are independent from the progress messages you can influence with --debug or --verbose. two different lanes, two different vibes 🦋
  • --language lang / -L lang — the index gets sorted according to the rules of language lang. those rules live inside a xindy module that's created by make-rules. ✨

and here's the little detail that matters: if no input encoding is specified via --codepage and none is enforced by the input markup, then a xindy module for that language is searched with a latin, a cp, an iso, ascii, or utf8 encoding — in that order. order matters, bestie 📋

  • --codepage enc / -C enc — okay so there are two totally different situations and use cases for this one. buckle in:
    1. Input markup is latex (which is the default).

then texindy's raw input is assumed to be encoded in LaTeX Internal Character Representation (LICR). i.e., non-ASCII characters are encoded as command sequences. this option tells xindy the encoding it shall use for letter group headings. (and additionally it specifies the encoding used internally for sorting — but that part doesn't matter for the result. lowkey irrelevant but we still tell you 💀)

only LICR encodings for Latin script alphabets are supported; more precisely, characters that are in LaTeX latin1, latin2, and latin3 LICR encodings.

and even when you specify utf8 as the codepage, only these characters will be known. but if you're using non-Latin alphabets, you probably use (or like, should use) XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX — and then you've got a different input markup entirely. different era, different rules 🌸

  1. Input markup is xelatex or omega.

then this option is ignored; codepage utf8 is enforced. periodt. 💅

texindy's raw input is assumed to be UTF-8 encoded, and LICR is not used.

  • --module module / -M module — loads the xindy module module.xdy. this option may be specified multiple times (stack 'em up 🧚). the modules are searched in the xindy search path, which you can change with the environment variable XINDY_SEARCHPATH. 🫶
  • --input-markup input / -I input — specifies the input markup of the raw index. the supported values for input are latex, xelatex, and omega. 🌈
    • latex input markup is the one emitted by default from the LaTeX kernel, or by the index macro package of David Jones, when used with standard LaTeX or pdfLaTeX. ^^-notation of single byte characters is supported. usage of LaTeX's inputenc package is assumed as well, i.e., raw input is encoded in LICR. 📦
    • xelatex input markup is like latex, but without inputenc usage. raw input is encoded in UTF-8. LuaLaTeX has the same input markup — there's no special option value for it. (not me forgetting LuaLaTeX exists, but ok, noted 💀)
    • omega input markup is like latex input markup, but with Omega's ^^-notation as the encoding for non-ASCII characters. LICR encoding is not used then, and utf8 is enforced to be the codepage for sorting and for output of letter group headings.

✨ SUPPORTED LANGUAGES / CODEPAGES ✨

these are the languages that are supported, bestie — the whole roster 👑

🌸 Latin scripts

 albanian      gypsy             portuguese
 croatian      hausa             romanian
 czech         hungarian         russian-iso
 danish        icelandic         slovak-small
 english       italian           slovak-large
 esperanto     kurdish-bedirxan  slovenian
 estonian      kurdish-turkish   spanish-modern
 finnish       latin             spanish-traditional
 french        latvian           swedish
 general       lithuanian        turkish
 german-din    lower-sorbian     upper-sorbian
 german-duden  norwegian         vietnamese
 greek-iso     polish

a few things you need to know, no cap:

  • German recognizes two different sorting schemes to handle umlauts: normally, ae is sorted like ae, but in phone books or dictionaries, it is sorted like a. the first scheme is known as DIN order, the second as Duden order. 📖
  • the *-iso language names assume that the raw index entries are in ISO 8859-9 encoding. 🎀
  • gypsy is a northern Russian dialect. (fun fact of the day, you're welcome ✨)

🌸 Cyrillic scripts

 belarusian    mongolian         serbian
 bulgarian     russian           ukrainian
 macedonian

🌸 Other scripts

 greek         klingon

🌸 Available Codepages

ngl this part is not yet written. 😭

you can look them up in your xindy distribution, inside the modules/lang/language/ directory (where language is your language, obviously). they're named variant-codepage-lang.xdy, where variant- is most often empty (for german, it's din5007 and duden; for spanish, it's modern and traditional, etc.) 🦋

 < Describe available codepages for each language >

 < Describe relevance of codepages (as internal representation) for
   LaTeX inputenc >

✨ TEXINDY STANDARD MODULES ✨

so there's this whole set of texindy standard modules that help process LaTeX index files. some of them are automatically loaded, some of them are loaded by default (and that can be turned off with a texindy option), and others you can specify as a --module argument to achieve a specific effect. ✨

here's the full rundown — same list, same details, just cuter 💖

🎀 Sorting

  • word-order — (Default) a space comes before any letter in the alphabet: index style is listed before indexing. turn it off with option -l. 📚
  • letter-order — (Add-on) spaces are ignored: index style is sorted after indexing.
  • keep-blanks — (Add-on) leading and trailing white space (blanks and tabs) are not ignored; intermediate white space is not changed. 🫶
  • ignore-hyphen — (Add-on) hyphens are ignored: ad-hoc is sorted as adhoc.
  • ignore-punctuation — (Add-on) all kinds of punctuation characters are ignored: hyphens, periods, commas, slashes, parentheses, and so on. all of it, gone, bye 💅
  • numeric-sort — (Auto) numbers are sorted numerically, not like characters: V64 appears before V128. 🔢

🎀 Page Numbers

  • page-ranges — (Default) appearances on more than two consecutive pages are listed as a range: 1--4. turn it off with option -r. 📄
  • ff-ranges — (Add-on) uses the implicit ff notation for ranges of three pages, and explicit ranges thereafter: 2f, 2ff, 2--6.
  • ff-ranges-only — (Add-on) uses only implicit ranges: 2f, 2ff. ✨
  • book-order — (Add-on) sorts page numbers with the common book numbering scheme correctly — Roman numerals first, then Arabic numbers, then others: i, 1, A. 📖

🎀 Markup and Layout

  • tex — (Auto) handles basic TeX conventions. 🎀
  • latex-loc-fmts — (Auto) provides LaTeX formatting commands for page number encapsulation.
  • latex — (Auto) handles LaTeX conventions, both in raw index entries and output markup; implies tex. 🌸
  • makeindex — (Auto) emulates the default MakeIndex input syntax and quoting behavior. 🦋
  • latin-lettergroups — (Auto) layout contains a single Latin letter above each group of words starting with the same letter. 🔤
  • german-sty — (Add-on) handles umlaut markup of babel's german and ngerman options. 🇩🇪

and that's where part 1 wraps, bestie — part 2 is coming, don't go anywhere 🫶

💅 COMPATIBILITY TO MAKEINDEX 💅

okay so real talk bestie: xindy does not claim to be completely compatible with MakeIndex, because if it were, that would prevent some of its enhancements. that said, we strive to deliver as much compatibility as possible. 🫶 the most important incompatibilities are:

  • for raw index entries in LaTeX syntax, \index{aaa|bbb} is interpreted differently. for MakeIndex, bbb is markup that is output as a LaTeX tag for this page number. for xindy, this is a location attribute, an abstract identifier that will be later associated with markup that should be output for that attribute.

for straight-forward usage, when bbb is textbf or similar, we supply location attribute definitions that mimic MakeIndex's behaviour. ✨

for more complex usage, when bbb is not an identifier, no such compatibility definitions exist and may also not been created with current xindy. such a situation is reported to exist for the memoir LaTeX class. 😭

programmers who know Common Lisp and Lex and want to work on a remedy should please contact the author. (not me saying this is your main character moment — go off 👑)

  • if you have an index rage 😤 and a location attribute, e.g., \index{key\(attr} starts the range, one needs (1) to specify that attribute in the range closing entry as well (i.e., as \index{key\)attr}) and (2) one needs to declare the index attribute in an xindy style file.

MakeIndex will output the markup \attr{page1--page2} for such a construct. this is not possible to achieve in xindy, output will be \attrMarkup{page1}--\attrMarkup{page2}. (this is actually considered a bug, but not a high priority one. 💀)

the difference between MakeIndex page number tags and xindy location attributes was already explained in the previous item.

  • the MakeIndex compatibility definitions support only the default raw index syntax and markup definition. it is not possible to configure raw index parsing or use a MakeIndex style file to describe output markup. periodt. 🔥

🌸 ENVIRONMENT 🌸

  • TEXINDY_AUTO_MODULE — this is the name of the xindy module that loads all auto-loaded modules. the default is texindy. slay, that's it, that's the whole variable 💖

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Joachim Schrod

📜 LEGALESE 📜

Copyright (c) 2004-2014 by Joachim Schrod.

texindy is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. 🌈

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. (fr fr, read the license, bestie — it's giving legally binding 🎀)

and that's the whole page, no cap 🦋 this was Release 2.5.1, dated 2020-05-28, and yes it lives at texindy(1). go index something iconic 💅✨

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