Formatted as a displayed block. An index in a book frequently causes a forced page break in print media.

In many processing systems, indexes are generated automatically or semiautomatically and never appear instantiated as DocBook markup.

Often an empty index is used to indicate where the automatically generated index should be rendered.

Authors can choose to have several types of indexes: for example, function, command, and concept indexes. This can be achieved in DocBook with the type attribute. All of the indexterms with a particular type will be collected together in the index with the same type.

All indexterms, irrespective of their type, appear in an index that has no type attribute.

Common attributes and common linking attributes.

These elements contain index: appendix, article, book, chapter, part, preface, section.

The following elements occur in index: address, anchor, bibliolist, blockquote, bridgehead, calloutlist, dialogue, drama, epigraph, equation, example, figure, formalpara, glosslist, indexterm (db.indexterm.endofrange), indexterm (db.indexterm.singular), indexterm (db.indexterm.startofrange), info (db.info), info (db.titleforbidden.info), informalequation, informalexample, informalfigure, informaltable, itemizedlist, literallayout, mediaobject, note, orderedlist, para, poetry, procedure, qandaset, remark, revhistory, sidebar, simpara, simplelist, subtitle, table, task, title, titleabbrev, variablelist.