Global indexes-new thread

[Steven Owens <uso01 -at- MAILHOST -dot- UNIDATA -dot- COM>]

Shannon Ford (fords -at- uniface -dot- nl), on the technical writers mailing list
(TECHWR-L -at- VM1 -dot- ucc -dot- okstate -dot- edu), asks:
> I wonder if anybody knows a good (i.e. automatic) way to generate
> global indexes with FrameMaker. We have approximately 12 indexed books
> (2000+ pages) from which we want to make a global index.

You really might want to post to the framers mailing list for advice.
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To post to the list, send mail to:  framers -at- engrg -dot- uwo -dot- ca

I'm cross-posting to the framers list so people there can suggest
solutions.

> I don't know exactly how it was done for the last documentation set,
> but I gather it was a bit of a hack. I think we made a book containing
> every chapter file in the doc set, and proceeded from there--
> generating the index over night, adding book codes in front of
> every page reference by hand, debugging, etc.

You probably did what we do for our Master Index.  We use FrameMaker 3,
so there may be better ways to do this for FrameMaker 4.

We maintain a book file which refers to all of the chapter and
appendix files in our other books (we have about 4700 pages of stuff
in formal publications).

The 'setup file' command allows you to specify certain things about
each chapter - like the page number prefix for generating TOC and
index page numbers.  As we add new books to the documentation set, and
the chapters are added to the book file, we do the 'setup file' on each
chapter and set the prefix to a book title abbreviation.

We also set the page numbering and paragraph numbering (which
otherwise would mess up the numbering on the original files -
IMPORTANT STEP, DON'T SKIP THIS, IF YOU DO, YOU'LL HAVE TO OPEN EACH
FILE AND DO FORMAT DOCUMENT TO RESET THE STARTING PAGE NUMBER!)

Once you have this set up, we generate the index, spell check it,
correct any errors (by editing the index marker, not the index file -
I've heard that FM4 establishes hyperlinks between the index entries
and their location in the documents - this would be really handy for
correcting typos and the like in the index) and proof the formatting.

That's about it.  The hardest part is catching and correcting typos,
and making sure we all follow the same conventions in choosing index
markers, i.e. a hypothetical command "FILE.OPEN" ideally should be
indexed under:

file,
  opening
opening
  files
FILE.OPEN Command
Commands
  FILE.OPEN

Tedious, but well worth it in the finished product.  Anybody have
pointers for doing this sort of thing in FM3?  Is it better in FM4?

Steven J. Owens
uso01 -at- unidata -dot- com