LaTeX has builtin support for creating an Index. The LaTeX core supports two different indices, the standard index and a glossary. With the help of special LaTeX packages (multind.sty or index.sty), any number of indices can be supported.
Index entries are created with the \index{entry}
macro.
All entries defined in a document are written out to the .aux
file. A separate tool must be used to convert this information into a
nicely formatted index. Tools used with LaTeX include MakeIndex
and xindy
.
Indexing is a very difficult task. It must follow strict conventions to make the index consistent and complete. There are basically two approaches one can follow, and both have their merits.
Before you start, you need to make sure that RefTeX knows about
the index style being used in the current document. RefTeX has
builtin support for the default \index
and \glossary
macros. Other LaTeX packages, like the multind or index
package, redefine the \index
macro to have an additional
argument, and RefTeX needs to be configured for those. A
sufficiently new version of AUCTeX (9.10c or later) will do this
automatically. If you really don’t use AUCTeX (you should!), this
configuration needs to be done by hand with the menu (Ref->Index
Style
), or globally for all your documents with
(setq reftex-index-macros '(multind)) or
(setq reftex-index-macros '(index))