Given a permutation of a collection of elements, it's trivially possible to find the next permutation (in lexicographic order) without ranking and unranking. Sedgewick 77 [1] calls it the Fischer-Krause algorithm.

The traditional (and still readable) reference for generating combinatorial objects such as permutations is Nijenhuis & Wilf's Combinatorial Algorithms.

The author of the article ubiquitously misspells "lexicographic" as "lexographic." That might make it harder to Google the term.

[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/ELE572Papers/p137-sedgewick...