According to The Companion, indices should be generated with the MakeIndex program. This is fine as long as one is writing English (and German?) texts; for other languages, however, the sorting mechanism does not work properly, since it does not take into account the language-specifik characters. This made me wonder if the index generation could be generated by (La)TeX itself. Are there any reasons why it couldn't? Index generation within LaTeX would perhaps be slow, but it a number of advantages would be gained: - The appearence of the index could be determined from the class, keeping with one of the goals of LaTeX. - The language-specific details such as special characters and sort orderering could be taken care of automatically. - It would not be necessary to depend on the extra program MakeIndex. The speed would of course be a problem; but a user could wait until he or she produces the final version of the document to produce the index. It would also be possible to generate an index in draft mode in which the entries were only partially solved (e.g., only sorted by first letter). I would like to hear some opinions on this matter, as I might start writing an experimental package. Soeren Sandmann -- Soeren Sandmann e-mail: [log in to unmask]