Will Writer v7.2 produce clickable hyperlink indexes?

[BrentG]

On the v7.2 update it says the General Improvements are:

"General improvements

• Alphabetical indexes, tables of contents and user-defined indexes will now generate clickable hyperlinks to document index entry marks core commit 7685c074 (Michael Stahl, allotropia)"

But I see no way to make the “Alphabetical” index entries clickable hyperlinks. I deleted my index and recreated it, and the page numbers in the index are still plain text (unclickable). Does this feature update only apply to user-defined indexes"? If so, why? What’s the difference between user defined index and alphabetical index? TIA

[ajlittoz]

From experience, a User index is some kind of TOC, not what we usually call an index, though Writer uses word “index” for all reference tables.

A TOC-like table lists its entries in page order without merging identical keys.

An index sorts its entries on the keys and merges identical keys into a single line (showing several page numbers on the same line).

The fact that you possibly get several targets in a single index line appears to me the reason why Writer can’t generate hyperlinks. Presently, the hyperlinkk (at least in TOC-like tables) is created by LS - LE markers in the Structure descriptor. When you describe a TOC-like entry, you have only a single # (page number target) and the hyperlink is unambiguous. In the index case, your Structure line also offers a # descriptor, but it is kind-of “vectorial” (multiple-valued if entries were merged). You can’t isolate LS - LE to designate a single occurrence.

Unless developers have changed this part of the engine, I don’t see how to insert hyperlinks in index in a way that the target is unique. Observe that this difficulty has been noted because LS - LE are not available for alphabetical index.

[anon87010807]

I don’t really see the point of having hyperlinks in an alphabetical index. It’d make the file a lot bigger, and you can first navigate to a page and then use Find to spot the lemma on that page. A bit more work, but not undoable. Linking to a heading from the TOC makes much more sense, you’d do that more often, and there aren’t that many links.

[BrentG]

If the Alphabetical index is not capable of being hyperlinked, can anyone explain what the “General Improvements” in v7.2 means:

" Alphabetical indexes, tables of contents and user-defined indexes will now generate clickable hyperlinks to document index entry marks (Michael Stahl, allotropia)"

[EarnestAl]

Misinterpretation of the effect of fixing tdf#121842. User-defined indexes in TOC did not generate hyperlinks even though the start and end markers for hyperlinks were inserted.

In the comments in that bug report at the end some confusion was introduced.

You could file a bug report on the release notes