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— section: Adjusting the typesetting subsection: Typesetting specialities permalink: /FAQ-makeindex date: 2014-06-10 —

# 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 Comes with most distributions — a good workhorse,

but is not well-arranged to deal with other sort orders than the
canonical ASCII ordering.

The [`makeindex`](https://ctan.org/pkg/makeindex) documentation is a good source of
information on how to create your own index. [`Makeindex`](https://ctan.org/pkg/Makeindex) can
be used with some TeX
macro packages other than LaTeX, such as 
[Eplain](FAQ-eplain.md), and TeX (whose macros can
be used independently with Plain TeX).

- idxtex for LaTeX under VMS; `idxtex` comes

with a glossary-maker `glotex`.

- texindex(1) A witty little shell-script using `sed`

and `awk`; designed for LaTeX under Unix.

- texindex(2) The [Texinfo](FAQ-texinfo.md) system also offers a program

`texindex`, whose source is to be found in the
`texinfo` distribution.  The [`ltxindex`](https://ctan.org/pkg/ltxindex) package
provides macros that enable LaTeX users to use this
`texindex`.

- xindy arose from frustration at the difficulty of making a

multi-language version of `makeindex`.  It is designed to
be a successor to `makeindex`, by a team that included the
then-current maintainer of `makeindex`.  It successfully
addresses many of `makeindex`s shortcomings, including
difficulties with collation order in different languages, and it is
highly flexible.

`Xindy` itself will work with Unicode (UTF-8) encoded
LaTeX input.  A separate application (`texindy`) deals
with ''standard'' LaTeX source, processes it and passes
''sanitised'' text to `Xindy`.