Control yomi-based indexing of Japanese content

Add and manage content

You can apply sort order to your content in Author-it to control the order in which text appears in sorted output such as indexes and headings. Although this feature is most important for Japanese text, you can also use it to add text-based sort order for items in other languages that begin with a number or symbol rather than a character from the alphabet.

In Author-it, you can enable yomi-based sort order by creating a topic description for sorting purposes that is separate from the regular description. For example, you could add a description in hiragana or katakana to topics that have a regular description in kanji. For text in an alphabet-based language like English or German, you could add a heading or index sort order description of include for the topic titled #include.

Assigning sort order to your content

You can assign a sort order description to topic headings (for ordinary topic content or glossary terms) or to index entries.

The Sort Order window displays the headings used by the topic or index entry for each output type (Print, Help, and Web).

  • If you select the Use the same for all headings check box (in order to have the same text for all output types), you can enter text in only one Sort as field. This first sort order description then applies to all other output types.
  • If you're using different headings for different output types, you can enter different sort order descriptions under Sort as for each output type.

Sort Order

To define the sort order for a topic heading or glossary term heading:

  1. Open the book in the Book Editor view, and select the topic.
  2. On the Review tab, click Sort Order.
  3. In the Sort as text box, enter the text the way you want it to appear in your index.
  4. Click OK.

To define the sort order for an index entry:

  1. Open the index object and click the Index Entries tab.
  2. Locate the index entry to which you want to assign the sort order, right-click the entry, and then select Sort Order.
  3. In the Sort as text box, enter the text for the entry the way you want it to appear in your index.
  4. Click OK.

Note: Author-it uses your text in the Sort as field in indexes for printed output such as Word. The index entry heading itself is used in the HTML index.