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Subject:Use of indexers and indexing From:Gwen Barnes <gwen -dot- barnes -at- MUSTANG -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 26 Jun 1995 15:45:46 GMT
-> I am interested in how technical writers handle the indexing of their
-> documents. Do you hire a professional indexer, use indexing programs
-> such as in Word 6, or do it yourself. I understand FrameMaker has
I ordered "Indexicon" based on a positive review, and was completely
disappointed with it. It seems to be suited to people who write
passive-voice boilerplate, but wasn't very good at what it said it did,
which was to find and index significant words and phrases. Junked it.
Also tried the 'concordence table' in Word6 to index long doc files, and
ended up with hundreds of page references for words like "file", with
no context. Not a good solution.
Neither supported a proper two or three-level index very well, nor was
there any way to make these programs figure out the significance of the
significant things, as opposed to the insignificant things.
Ended up indexing all the heading levels twice, eg {XE "Makewild:Modem
setup}{XE "Modem setup:Makewild"}. Time permitting, I went through the
rest of the text to hunt down other things readers might be interested
in looking for, including synonyms and cyber-slang.
Cheers, @DISCLAIMER@
Gwen gwen -dot- barnes -at- mustang -dot- com
MSI * Connecting the world 805-873-2500
