PION Manual.

Creating an index.

To create a new index with Index Office one needs to choose Create from Index menu, Fig.3.

Fig.3. Index menu.
Then a dialog for creating an index will appear (Fig.4).

Fig.4. Create index dialog.
The dialog for creating an index has three text-fields.

The first - for the title of the index.
The second - for the icon address. One can either type in the icon location or choose it by browsing through directories.
The third - for URL address. As URL addresses PION accepts the directories on a hard-drive as well as http-addresses of web-sites on the Internet.

After typing in the third text-field an http-address of a web-site to be indexed and pushing the button Add the link to the added web-site will appear in the area above buttons "OK" and "Cancel" (Fig.5).

Fig.5. URL is added.
One can define how the corresponding URL has to be indexed. If you point your mouse to the URL in the area depicted in Fig.5 and click the right button, then the URL will be highlighted. Now if you hold the right button, then you will see the menu that shows what you can do with this particular URL. For example, if you choose "Change Depth" from this menu then the following dialog will pop up (Fig.6).

Fig.6. Define the depth.
The depth is an integer that is equal to how many branches of the tree of html-links will be indexed and/or mirrored. For example, if the depth is zero, then only the web-site itself is indexed and/or mirrored. If the depth is 1, then the web-site itself and all its html-links will be served etc.

Now let us take a look at four pairs of radio buttons in Fig.4.
When PION creates an index Index_i (i=1,2,...) it enumerates all files, URLs and write them in file.lst. Then pion creates the file word.ind that contains all the words from files and URLs taken from file.lst. Each word is accompanied with numbers corresponding to the addresses of files and/or URLs where the word could be found.
If Yes is chosen for Optimal?, then PION optimizes word.ind and creates xword.ind.

If Yes is set for Compress?, then PION creates file.zip, word.zip, xword.zip instead of file.lst, word.ind, xword.ind, respectively.

If Yes is selected for Index now?, then the index will be created immediately. Otherwise, the real indexing will be skipped, but the index directory with all config files will be in place.

If No is pushed for Use Default Browser?, then PION will enquire the executable of the browser which will be used to serve this particular index (Fig.7).

Fig.7. Enter the browser command.
One is supposed to enter the complete path to the browser executable. For example, if netscape is located in /usr/bin, then /usr/bin/netscape has to be typed in the text-field of the dialog in Fig.7.
After adding an URL address to the area above "OK" and "Cancel" buttons one can expand it and add to the index the links from this URL. It can be done by clicking on the URL and holding the right button of the mouse. From the pop up menu one can choose Expand option and then Pion will expand the corresponding URL. After expanding operation is completed double-click on URL will show the added links (Fig.8).

Fig.8. Expanded URL.

After Create index dialog is completed and OK button is pressed. PION starts creating the index. During this work the open book icon is used for the index. For example, in Fig.9 the LinuxHOWTO index is in work.

Fig.9. The LinuxHOWTO index is in work.

After the i-th index is created let us look into the directory Index_i in .PHome. It has Index.conf which is similar to the following.

#ICON is updated #Thu Mar 30 23:41:03 MST 2000 OPTIMAL=Yes TITLE=Chess COMPRESS=Yes BROWSER=/usr/bin/netscape ICON=/home/devel/.PHome/images/icon.chess.gif TRIMMED=No

Index_i contains URL.lst which is the list of URLs used to create the index. The file Index.log documents the messages and errors generated during the indexing process. The usage of the file word.trm will be discussed later in this manual. The actual index itself is presented by the files file.lst, word.ind and, if the index is optimized, then xword.ind is added. If the index is annotated then annotate.zip is present in the index directory. If one decides to add "Ignore Case" feature to the index, then der1.zip will be created in the index directory.