Using the Sort Order

Author-it's sort order is primarily used for Japanese Yomi sorting and allows a Topic description to be indexed under a different description.

What is Yomi sorting?

In the English language, words consist of characters from the Latin alphabet and are ordered (alphabetically) by their spelling.

The Japanese writing system on the other hand, consists of several different types of characters:

Hiragana characters are very curved and gracefully written. They represent sounds and are used for original Japanese words.
Katakana characters have more lines and sharp angles. They represent the same sounds, but they are used mainly for foreign words that have been adapted to Japanese.
Hiragana and katakana are collectively known as Kana.
Kanji are characters taken from the Chinese writing system. Chinese is a pictoral language, and the characters represent ideas and concepts rather than sounds. This can also make them extremely difficult to learn.

Kana represents sound of speech with each character having a single unique pronunciation. Kana characters have a predetermined order just like the English alphabet which goes from 'a' to 'z'. Kanji on the other hand, represents meaning, not sound, and usually has two or more pronunciations determined by its context.

Let's look at an example:
The kanji for mountain is . River is . The Japanese kana word for mountain is (pronounced like yama). River is (kawa). is read as yama and as kawa when they stand alone in a sentence. However if and are concatenated to form a single word ( ) to mean a landscape with mountains and rivers, they are pronounced as sanga (and represented as in kana). Confused yet?

How about we try a western example? We'll say that the symbol is used to represent man, and the symbol to represent rocket. If we use them together - - they represent astronaut. When we build our index, rocket and astronaut should not be sorted together, but under their appropriate headings - astronaut under A, and rocket under R.

Essentially, Yomi is a sorting key. In Japanese, kana characters are used to represent pronunciation of kanji, and Yomi is a kana word associated with a kanji word for pronunciation and sorting purposes.

How else can the sort order be used?

While defining the sort order is critical in Japanese to create a good index, it is also useful in other languages (including English) when any of your Topic Headings begin with a non-alpha character.

For example, you may be documenting fields that begin with a special character. Let's say you have a topic named #include. By defining the sort order as include, the entry appears under I rather than #. Likewise, you may be writing a detailed procedure where you've created a topic for each step, and numbered each topic accordingly. A topic named 1. Start the Importer, would normally appear in the Index above the alpha headings under a numerical heading 1. By defining the sort order as Start the Importer, the topic appears under S.

Note: The Sort Order is only used to determine where the entry appears, not how it displays. The Topic Headings and the Index entry itself still display the non-alpha character/s.

To define the sort order:

Open the Book in the Book Editor view, and select the topic.
Choose Tools > Sort Order from the Book Editor menu.
Enter the Heading as it should be sorted in the Index and choose OK.