Japanese sort order in indexes

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:34:55 +0900, Makoto Nagasawa 
<makoto15 at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hello Celine,
>
>On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 10:46 PM, Jeremy H. Griffith 
<jeremy at omsys.com> wrote:
>>
>> The problem with Japanese is that it is not sorted
>> by the Unicode character order of the displayed
>> glyphs (which are usually katakana).  Instead, it
>> is sorted according to the pronunciation of the
>> words, as given in a different script, kanji.
>> The software has no idea what the kanji is, so
>> you have to provide it by the usual Frame sort
>> order method, in []s for every single index entry.
>> Naturally this requires a Japanese native speaker.
>>
>
>You may use a software to convert Kanji to Kana (pronunciation).

Thanks, that is interesting!

>- KAKASI - Kanji Kana Simple Inverter
>http://kakasi.namazu.org/

It looks like the links to compiled versions are all broken;
you can still get the source at:
http://kakasi.namazu.org/stable/kakasi-2.3.4.tar.gz

It's a little hard to determine what tools are needed to build 
it...  Looks like it expects a UNIX/Linux environment.

>I use KAKASI and Perl Module
>(http://search.cpan.org/~dankogai/Text-Kakasi-2.04/Kakasi.pm) to
>insert Kana (pronunciation) in
>FrameMaker Mif file.

For this you definitely need to be a perl programmer.
Both parts are GPL, which is good, if anyone with the
required skills feels like making a package usable on 
Windows.

>However, Japanese native speaker need to check
>whether the Index are sorted correctly or not.

Definitely!

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/