Use of indexers and indexing

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

Linda -

here is the guts of a message I posted recently in response to a
question on comp.text.frame. There are a few references to MS Word
and FrameMaker, but generally it just describes the procedure, not
specific commands. Sorry, it's a bit long.

Two more observations to add to the comments below:

- the facilities in Word and Frame are OK for knocking out a basic
  index fast. It won't be very useful but it will look nice. If you
  want to do a good job it will take lateral thinking and some hard
  work. That's why I'm interested in dedicated indexing software; it
  won't help with the thinking but it should automate a lot of the
  drudgery.

- I would like to try a professional indexer one day. I expect they
  would do a much more thorough and professional job, but I don't
  see how they could decide what to index and how without a lot of
  suggestions from me. I don't think I'm big-noting myself; it's hard
  enough for me to put myself in my readers' shoes. How would someone
  who doesn't know the software and our users do it?

Regards

Stuart

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With MS Word and probably other WP packages you can create a 'concord-
ance file', which is a list of words and phrases that will be marked
or tagged automatically. (I suspect this isn't the technical meaning
of a concordance, but that's what Microsoft calls it...)

I haven't yet produced an index in Frame but I'd be surprised if there
weren't several add-on products to help automate production of indexes,
including support for concordance files. This still puts markers
everywhere, but at least you can automate a lot of the drudgery.

If you're going to be producing an index more than once or twice I
would seriously look around. I know of one product, IXgen from Frank
Stearns & Associates (franks -at- fsatools -dot- com). I haven't tried it yet but
it sounds promising. If I get to use it properly I'll post comments.

Concordance files are particularly useful if you have several documents
with a core set of terms that are used in all. I use a small file of
shared terms as a starting point when preparing the index for a new
manual. This helps ensure that these terms are indexed consistently.

>I confess to having no experience whatsoever in indexing, although next
>week's task is to index my 200 page book so I imagine I'll be learning a
>lot.

You have my sympathies! Been there, done that, still have the night-
mares to prove it.

It's a lot of work to produce a weak index, much more work to produce
a good one. The thing to remember is that a poor index will undermine
your 200 pages of brilliant writing by frustrating your reader out of
his wits.

>Try this. Insert an index entry in front of a word (or phrase), then
>select the marker and the word but no surrounding spaces. Then Find
>successive occurrences of the word, and Change by Pasting. This will paste
>the marker and the word.

>I can't think of a way to automatically accommodate changes in case -- the
>first letter of the word or phrase being capitalized at the beginning of a
>sentence, say -- so I guess you'll have to make two passes.

>Unless you're doing something like a concordance of Shakespeare, I would
>recommend against indiscriminantly placing an index marker on every
>occurrence of the word: you run the risk of driving your reader crazy with
>unimportant references. Use your judgement to tag only the occurrences
>that your reader might be seeking.

Yes, this is good advice. I find it useful to do the following (this is
off the top of my head):

- list the words and phrases you want to index
- save a clean copy of the document
- mark everything using find+change (you will want to automate this!)
- generate an index (this lists every occurrence of every marked phrase)
- use this 'first pass' index to go back and refine your list of words
  and phrases (see below)
- using your refined list of terms and the clean copy of the document,
  produce the final index.

Some things to look out for in your first-pass index:

- terms with too many page references
- terms with no page references. Where did they go?
- runs of consecutive pages that could be made into ranges (6-9, not
  6,7,8,9). Page ranges are good; they save you marking a lot of
  individual references.
- one concept that is split across several terms. E.g. you probably don't
  want to have

  Label         23, 66, 67
  ...
  Tape label    66, 111, 114
  ...
  Volume label  88

  if these are basically synonyms. Use index cross-references for these.
  That is, make one term the main one, and have a 'See ...' reference
  under the others:

  Label         23, 66, 67, 88, 111, 114
  ...
  Tape label    _See_ Label
  ...
  Volume label  _See_ Label

Another option is to have page references under one heading but also
point to a related entry with a 'See also...'. For example:

  Recover files 88, 91, 106, 111-115    _See also_ Online index

Work through each index entry using Find. Keep separate lists of terms that
should be indexed every time they appear, and those that you only want to
index selectively. The first list is your concordance file; if you ever
need to recreate the index you can mark up these terms automatically with
macros. The second list you will have to mark up one at a time using Find+
Change and either confirming or skipping each reference.

You might even choose to separate the second list into 'rarely indexed'
and 'usually indexed'. For the first lot you would use Find+Change to
step through each occurrence and selectively mark the ones you want. For
the second lot, you globally mark every reference, then selectively use
Change to _remove_ the marker from the ones you don't want to index.

You will often want a term to appear under different index entries,
depending on the context. For example, I might want to index one
reference to 'COS/Manager user' under:

COS/Manager user
   Adding       33

and another as:

Security
   COS/Manager user     34

Finally, make the index the second last thing you do (the Tables of
Contents etc are the last). You don't want to be making changes after
the index has been produced.

For more information on planning and organising an index, the Word manual
recommends _The Chicago Manual of Style_ (University of Chicago Press).
I've heard of an American group that's the professional body for indexers
there (can't think of the name). I expect other countries have them too.

Good luck and happy indexing.
--
Stuart Burnfield                I thought a bilabial fricative was still
Voice:  +61 9 328 8288          technically illegal in some states, till
PO Box 192 Leederville          I discovered alt.usage.english
Western Australia 6903