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Tom Hancock <<...occasionally produces reference issues for
which we provide indexes. We would like to improve the
quality of these indexes and would like to find out any
strategies or special software technical writers and
editors may use.>>
You're conflating two problems here: speed and quality. If all
you're looking for is tools, you can use the built-in indexing
tools in the software you're already using (Word), and I'm
reasonably sure there's a Quark extension that will do the
same thing from within Quark. In this approach, all you need
to do is get your editors to tag the files as they edit them. If,
on the other hand, you're looking for better-quality indexes,
you need a trained human indexer, and the tools are irrelevant
other than in terms of how easy they make it to generate the
index.