Tools for Printing Indexes

This paper describes a set of programs for processing and printing the index for a book or a manual. The input consists of lines containing index terms and page numbers. The programs collect multiple occurrences of the same terms, compress runs of page numbers, create permutations (e.g., ‘index, book’ from ‘book index’), and sort them into proper alphabetic order. The programs can cope with embedded formatting commands (size and font changes, etc.), with roman numeral page numbers, and with see terms. The programs do not help with the original creation of