xindy(1)

📦 version 2026.0, in alpine 3.24

💖 NAME 💖

xindy — create sorted and tagged index from raw index. that's the whole entire vibe bestie, no cap 🦋

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

 xindy [-V?h] [-qv] [-d magic] [-o outfile.ind] [-t log] \
       [-L lang] [-C codepage] [-M module] [-I input] \
       [--interactive] [--mem-file=xindy.mem] \
       [idx0 idx1 ...]

🫶 GNU-Style Long Options for Short Options 🫶

 -V / --version
 -? / -h / --help
 -q / --quiet
 -v / --verbose
 -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, xindy)

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so. xindy is the formatter-independent command of xindy, the flexible indexing system (yes the command and the system share a name, it's giving main character energy, we move 💅). what it does: it takes a raw index as input, and produces a merged, sorted and tagged index. and the merging, the sorting, and the tagging? all controlled by xindy style files. periodt.

the files with the raw index get passed as arguments. pass no arguments at all and the raw index will be read from standard input. easy 🎀

xindy is completely described in its manual that you will find on its Web Site, http://www.xindy.org/. a good introductionary description appears in the indexing chapter of the LaTeX Companion (2nd ed.) 📚

if you want to produce an index for LaTeX documents, the command texindy(1) is probably more of interest for you. it is a wrapper for xindy that turns on many LaTeX conventions by default. like, it's the preppy version, iykyk 🌈

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • --version / -V — output version numbers of all relevant components and exit. bye 👋
  • --help / -h / -? — output usage message with options explanation.
  • --quiet / -q — don't output progress messages. output only error messages. shhh 🤫
  • --verbose / -v — output verbose progress messages. she's chatty 💬
  • --debug magic / -d magic — output debug messages, this option may be specified multiple times. magic determines what is output:
    • 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
  • --out-file outfile.ind / -o outfile.ind — output index to file outfile.ind. if this option is not passed, the name of the output file is the base name of the first argument and the file extension ind. if the raw index is read from standard input, this option is mandatory. no stdin slacking, bestie 😤
  • --log-file log.ilg / -t log.ilg — output log messages to file log.ilg. these log messages are independent from the progress messages that you can influence with --debug or --verbose. two separate lanes, we don't mix 🦋
  • --language lang / -L lang — the index is sorted according to the rules of language lang. these rules are encoded in a xindy module created by make-rules.
    • if no input encoding is specified via --codepage or enforced by input markup, a xindy module for that language is searched with a latin, a cp, an iso, ascii, or utf8 encoding, in that order.
    • language modules are either placed in the lang or in the contrib/lang sub-directory of the modules base directory.
  • --codepage enc / -C enc — the raw input is in input encoding enc. this information is used to select the correct xindy sort module and output encoding of letter group headings.
    • when xelatex or omega input markup is used, utf8 is always used as codepage, then this option is ignored. 🙈
    • if raw input is in LICR, texindy(1) should be used instead of xindy(1). it will activate a mapping of inputenc encoding for latex input markup to the chosen raw input codepage.
  • --module module / -M module — load the xindy module module.xdy. this option may be specified multiple times. the modules are searched in the xindy search path that can be changed with the environment variable XINDY_SEARCHPATH.
  • --input-markup input / -I input — specifies the input markup of the raw index. supported values for input are latex, xelatex, omega, and xindy.
    • latex and xelatex input markup is the one that is emitted by default from the LaTeX kernel, or by the index macro package of David Jones. ^^-notation of single byte characters is supported. remapping of LICR-encoded characters is not done; use texindy(1) for that. use input markup latex if you use standard LaTeX or pdfLaTeX and use input markup xelatex if you use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX.
    • omega input markup is like latex input markup, but with Omega's ^^-notation as encoding for non-ASCII characters.
    • xindy input markup is specified in the xindy manual.
  • --interactive — start xindy in interactive mode. you will be in a xindy read-eval-loop where xindy language expressions are read and evaluated interactively. it's giving REPL, it's giving slay 👑
  • --mem-file xindy.mem — this option is only usable for developers or in very rare situations. the compiled xindy kernel is stored in a so-called memory file, canonically named xindy.mem, and located in the xindy library directory. this option allows to use another xindy kernel. ⚠️

🌈 SUPPORTED LANGUAGES / CODEPAGES 🌈

the following languages are supported:

🌸 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

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. (yes they really do fight about umlauts, iconic honestly 💅)

*-iso language names assume that the raw index entries are in ISO 8859-9 encoding.

gypsy is a northern Russian dialect. 🎻

🦋 Cyrillic scripts

 belarusian    mongolian         serbian
 bulgarian     russian           ukrainian
 macedonian

⭐ Other scripts

 greek         klingon

(not me being obsessed that klingon is a legit supported sorting language. ate. 🖖)

🎀 Available Codepages

This is not yet written. you can look them up in your xindy distribution, in the modules/lang/language/ directory (where language is your language). they are 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 >

🦋 ENVIRONMENT 🦋

  • XINDY_SEARCHPATH — a list of directories where the xindy modules are searched in. no subtree searching is done (as in TDS-conformant TeX).
    • if this environment variable is not set, the default is used:
".:"modules_dir":"modules_dir"/base"
  • modules_dir is determined at run time, relative to the xindy command location: either it's ../modules, that's the case for opt-installations. or it's ../lib/xindy/modules, that's the case for usr-installations.
  • XINDY_LIBDIR — library directory where xindy.mem is located.
    • the modules directory may be a subdirectory, too.

💀 COMPATIBILITY TO MAKEINDEX 💀

xindy does not claim to be completely compatible with MakeIndex, 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. 👀
  • 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.

😭 KNOWN ISSUES 😭

  • option -q also prevents output of error messages. error messages should be output on stderr, progress messages on stdout.
  • there should be a way to output the final index to stdout. this would imply -q, of course.
  • LaTeX raw index parsing should be configurable.
  • codepage utf8 should be supported for all languages, and should be used as internal codepage for LaTeX inputenc re-encoding.

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

texindy(1), tex2xindy(1)

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Joachim Schrod

⭐ LEGALESE ⭐

Copyright (c) 2004-2014 by Joachim Schrod.

xindy 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.

and that's the whole page bestie, you're officially an xindy girlie now 🫶 go make some gorgeously sorted indexes, i believe in you 💖

Release 2.5.1 · 2020-05-28 · xindy(1) — ok that's the version and date, dropping it here like a lil signature, bye bestieee 🌸✨

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