[XeTeX] how to customize sorting order of characters in index

[Kamal Abdali]

Thanks, Dominik. I had seen your https://cikitsa.blogspot.ca/
2016/07/getting-xindy-to-work-for-iast-encoded.html before during a Web
searching. But a member of this group has kindly promised to write a xindy
piece for Urdu. So instead of trying to do the same also on my own, I am
trying to still make imakeidx/makeindex work. As far as I understand,
Makeindex sorts non-Latin characters in the order of their Unicode
numerical code. The following approach, awful and artificial though it is,
seems to sort Urdu index entries correctly, essentially by using the
makeindex command \index{string1 at string2} where string2 is the actual Urdu
​index entry and string1 is its representation described below:

​
​Urdu letters
​appear in the Arabic script Unicode block 0600-06FF. For about 12 letters,
the utf8 numerical order differs from their Urdu alphabetic order. For
example, in the Urdu alphabet the letter "peh" comes between the letters
"beh" and "teh", but in the Unicode table the utf8 of "peh" is larger than
that of "teh". So what I am doing is to represent "peh" by two characters,
"beh" followed by another one with utf8 larger than of all Urdu letters.
Actually, for these extra characters I use the so-called "Eastern Arabic
Digits" 0,1,2, ... which I can type on my keyboard and don't need
otherwise. Also if two or more Urdu letters come alphabetically between two
adjacent utf-8 positions, then for representing them this way with properly
ordered representations, digits serve as convenient and easily rememberable
extra characters.

Here, for example, is an \index command to get the Urdu word "ناکارگی"
(pronounced as nākāragī" and meaning "entropy" in English) show up in
its correct position in index:

\index{
ناق۰ارق۵ی
@
ناکارگی
{

Doing such extra work for many entries in the index is too cumbersome. But
at least the index is prepared correctly. And my priority for the moment is
to get something (in which the index is the only unfinished part) finished
and delivered, before worrying about elegant solutions! Thanks to everyone
who offered suggestions in response to my inquiries.

Kamal Abdali

On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 3:27 PM, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com>
wrote:

> A while back, I had a similar issue, and I made some notes about how I got
> the sorting I needed.  See here:
>
>    - https://cikitsa.blogspot.ca/2016/07/getting-xindy-to-work-
>    for-iast-encoded.html
>
>
> ​
> --
> Professor Dominik Wujastyk <http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk>
> ​,​
>
> Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
> ​,​
>
> Department of History and Classics
> <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
> ​,​
> University of Alberta, Canada
> ​.​
>
> South Asia at the U of A:
>
> ​sas.ualberta.ca​
> ​​
>
>
> On 13 May 2018 at 17:04, Kamal Abdali <k.abdali at acm.org> wrote:
>
>> I'm using polyglossia and imakeindex to produce an Urdu document. The
>> sorting order of letters in the index is wrong. The order is according to
>> Arabic, but Urdu has about 9 more letters which are being pushed after the
>> Arabic letters in the index. I couldn't find an option to fix this in the
>> imakeindex style file. It probably should be specified in polyglossia but I
>> don't see a way there either. Any suggestions please?
>>
>> Kamal Abdali
>>
>>
>>
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