Index compilation (genindex)

Describe the enhancement you’d like

I can’t find a way to make use of sphinx’s genindex function to automatically compile an index. From what I can tell, this doesn’t exist in jupyter-book, and has not yet been requested. (Sorry if I missed something!)

Does this solve a specific problem?

Books should have indices!

Publishers often require indices, and since sphinx already provides this functionality, it seems silly not to use it if we can.

What alternatives exist?

Hand-crafting an index file. Maybe okay for short documents, but definitely prohibitive for something approaching book length.

Additional context

No response

[bmcfee]

Does it have to be rst code? Isn’t it just a directive? You could try it with the eval_rst directive and see if the outcome is different that way?

I didn’t know that was an option 😁 that actually works great! The only remaining problem is that I don’t see how to add the generated index into the toctree.

[mdekstrand]

It turns out you can’t actually include genindex in a normal Sphinx toc tree without bad and buggy workarounds, such as this one. The genindex isn’t available when the toctree is being resolved in a normal Sphinx build.

I’m not sure why. It is very annoying. If I can dig up the relevant Sphinx issue I’ll link it here.