Generating an index in (La)TeX

Making an index is not trivial; what to index, and how to index it, is difficult to decide, and uniform implementation is difficult to achieve. You will need to mark all items to be indexed in your text (typically with \index commands).

It is not practical to sort a large index within TeX, so a post-processing program is used to sort the output of one TeX run, to be included into the document at the next run.

The following programs are available:

makeindex

for LaTeX under Unix (but runs under other OSs without changes). Available in indexing/makeindex; a version for the Macintosh is available as systems/mac/macmakeindex.sit, and ones for MS-DOS are part of the emTeX and gTeX distributions (the emTeX version also runs under OS/2).

The Makeindex documentation is a good source of information on how to create your own index. Makeindex can be used with some TeX macro packages other than LaTeX, such as Eplain, and \TeXsis{}, macros/texsis (whose macros, macros/texsis/index/index.tex, can be used independently with plain).

idxtex

for LaTeX under VMS. Available (together with a glossary-maker called glotex) in indexing/glo+idxtex

texindex

A witty little shell/sed-script-based utility for LaTeX under Unix. Available from support/texindex

There are other programs called texindex, notably one that comes with the Texinfo distribution.

xindy

a recent development, designed for wide-ranging flexibility (including support for multilingual indexes), based on Common Lisp. The system is available on CTAN (\CTAN{support/xindy}), but is more easily accessed from a web browser via http://www.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de/xindy/ since the distribution contains several different implementations.