HTML Indexing Bundle

The HTML Indexing commands have evolved into a full bundle for TextMate. For those of you who told me the original commands saved you some time on your last project, this should make the next one a breeze. The shot on the left shows a quick preview of the new auto-index with summaries command, which scans for all anchors and pulls the first 10 words following them to create an index using a definition list with even/odd classnames on the lines for styling. Download is at the end of the post. Here’s a rundown from the included help file…

Creating the Anchors

The first step is to create the anchors in the document, or the places where the index links will jump to on the page. These can be headlines, first lines of text, or simply locations with no text. To create an anchor, press ⌃-⇧-R and select “Create Named Anchor” (1) from the menu. If you have text selected, it will offer you a suggested name. This command inserts only a snippet for you to edit.

Manually Creating Anchor Links

You can manually link text to your anchors by selecting the text (or image) to link, pressing ⌃-⇧-R, and selecting “Create Named Anchor Link” (2). It will give you a list of all of the anchors in the current page and selecting one will create the link to the anchor. It will be inserted as a snippet for you to edit as necessary.

Automatic Indexing

There are two indexing commands. From the ⌃-⇧-R menu, selecting “Create Index of Anchors” (3) will create an ordered list (ol) of all of the indexes in the order they appear in the document. The <ol> tag is a stop in the snippet, so it can easily be changed to an unordered list or have a class added or removed from it.

The second choice, “Create Index with Summaries” (4) will create a definition list (dl) with the link text as the definition term (dt) and the first 10 words of the following text as the summary. Truncated text will be followed by an ellipsis (…).

The resulting indexes include classes for easy styling of the indexes. These classes can be removed with some simple editing of the ruby commands, if you know what you’re doing.

Sub-indexing

Running either of the indexing commands while a portion of the document is selected will index only that part of the document and copy the results to the clipboard. There is a 5th command (“Insert Clipboard as Snippet”) in the ⌃-⇧-R menu that allows you to paste the results as a snippet at an appropriate location in the document.

Download: htmlindex_tm.zip

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