Index Sorting for Language Symbols

Paligo can currently only use UTF-8 to define the sort order in an index. This means that languages that use symbols or a mix of symbols and phonemic characters (like Japanese, Korean and Chinese) will encounter problems when publishing in multiple languages.

A possible workaround for PDF output is by defining an indexterm that uses a phonemic word (alphabetic writing) for index sorting. The indexterm is invisible in the topics and works in the background to sort and group the index references.

The sortas attribute on the primary, secondary and tertiary elements is used to express a key. Usually the key is the same word as used as the value of the primary, secondary and tertiary element. This key is subsequently used to look up the actual phonemic version of the term in a lookup file for the language being published to.

The image above shows a possible Japanese index.