Re: I'm gonna be an Indexer!!

[Julia Land <jltw -at- EARTHLINK -dot- NET>]

> am I gonna have fun, or what??

Actually, I always enjoy indexing.

Question 1:
> if you could
> buy 1 book on indexing that would get me up to speed
> quickest ...

Lots of people have suggested _The Chicago Manual of Style_, and that's
a good resource. You might also look at _Read Me First_ from Sun
Technical Publications. It has an extensive section on indexing
technical manuals.

The American Society of Indexers has a web page with a listing of
resources. See

http://www.asindexing.org/asires.htm

Question 2:
> Would you do the indexing in Frame and then
> convert it over, or would you convert it, then index
> it in Word.

What happens after you convert it to Word? Will it ever be revised? If
so, will the Word doc or the Frame doc be the starting point for the new
version? I'd do the indexing in that program. (Of course I've never
indexed in Word and I've never converted a Frame doc to Word.)

Question 3:

> For a one-time indexing project (complex 450 page
> manual), would IXGEN be worth the investment, or would
> the learning curve negate the time it would save?
>

If you are indexing in Frame, YES, YES, YES! (Can you tell I like
IXgen?) The value in the program is not in creating the index entries
(although it can help with that), it's in editing them later. It's in
finding all those entries where you indexed using the term thingy
instead of thingies. Or where you have six entries that read

thingies, pink

and another five that read

thingies
  pink

I shudder to think of fixing that in Frame--hopping back and forth
between the index and the source documents, opening the marker window,
being careful to remember to click Edit Marker before moving on, and so
on.

In IXgen, you create a list of index markers and there they all are,
listed in alphabetic order. You then search the list for thingies, pink
and replace them all with thingies:pink. Apply the edited marker list
and you fixed that problem in five minutes.

There is a trial version of IXgen available at

http://www.pacifier.com/~franks

I highly recommend you give it a try if you are going to be indexing in
Frame. It's very easy to use.

Good luck.

Julia Land
jalnd -at- earthlink -dot- net

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