tagOptions property: ignore.sort

[DavidHB]

Well, after a few days puzzling over the various references in the User Guide and a few tests, I confess to being none the wiser. Except that I think that I can define the problem rather better.

I hope we'd agree that a core use case for ignore.sort is to prevent definite and indefinite articles being indexed. This works pretty well for, say, English and German, where articles are normally whole words, surrounded by white space. It doesn't work for languages where the words are sometimes elided (typically with an apostrophe) into their associated noun. So, in a list of Vivaldi's works, L'estro armonico would be indexed under L, while Le quattro stagioni would be found under Q. This somewhat reduces the usefulness of ignore.sort.

Unless I have misunderstood things (which is certainly possible), there is no way to get round this issue using value.sort, and things would get a bit complicated in any case if every ignore.sort had to have a corresponding value.sort. I do take the point about not allowing the syntax to become too complex. But would it be possible to change the rule, so that the specified ignore string, instead of having to be surrounded by white space, simply has to be at the start of the tag value? This would implement the core use case correctly in a wider range of instances.

David