High-end book publishers require the ability to control whether the page numbers in an index are merged when there are identical entries on contiguous pages. For example, if the same entry appears on page 6, page 7 and page 8, a publisher might want to have the pages merged, like this: 6-8, or they might prefer to list the entries separately: 6, 7, 8.
The second case makes sense if there really are three separate mentions of an index term that the reader should look at and not a continuous piece of text that discusses a topic, beginning on page 6 and ending on page 8, as the merged page number seems to imply.
It is even more confusing if the publisher uses compound page numbers that have a hyphen incorporated in them. If the three entries above were in Chapter 3 on pages 6, 7 and 8, the merged page range could look like this: 3-6-3-8, which is difficult for the reader to understand.
FOSIs offer the ability to use maxunmerge to control this function and Styler needs to offer the same capability. See PTC Case C12794408 for more details.
