There are professional indexers in the world. Their work can dramatically increase the quality of a book. Conversely, a poor index can cause a lot of reader frustration. So assuming you do not aspire to be a professional indexer, we'll leave you with perhaps the most useful advice a professional indexer is likely to give you to create a decent index: pretend you're a reader. Stepping into the reader's shoes helps you anticipate what information the reader will want to find in the index. If a section in your document or book contains important information on creating a file, which words might the target reader look for in the index to get to that information? "Creating a file" is an obvious choice. But might they also look under the word "File"? What about "Generating"? "Adding"? "Starting"? Or what about "Document" in addition to "File"? Or even more specifically , "Text document" or "Spreadsheet"? The index terms might not even appear in the text of a document or book. The index entries you insert are up to you. But looking at your index from a reader's perspective helps ensure that the index will be more useful than it otherwise would be. Marking Index EntriesFor Writer to generate an index with related page numbers , you must mark the items you want to index right where they appear in the document.
When you insert an entry, the selected word gets a gray background (if View > Field Shadings is activated). Note You can also prevent partial words from being marked ; select Whole Words Only. Inserting an Index Into a Single DocumentPreviewing TOCs and indexesWhen you insert indexes and tables of contents, select the Preview option in the lower right corner of the Index tab, in the Insert Index/Table window. You'll see how the TOC or index will look with the current settings.The preview window is shown at right.
Use this procedure for inserting a table of contents into a single document rather than a master document. The procedure for inserting a table of contents into a master document follows this one. You don't have to insert all your index entries before you generate an index. You can go back and make additional entries, then update the index.
All parts of an index have their own paragraph formats you can modify. Click in a line of the index, and the name of the style is highlighted in the Stylist under paragraph styles. Using a Concordance to Help Create an IndexIf you're creating an alphabetical index as shown in Figure 9-25, you can use a concordance, an extra file with guidance for how to create the index. What It IsIt's a way of setting up ahead of time how you're going to index anyway. Let's say that you're indexing a cookbook that has grown out of your fabulous collection of brownie recipes. Every time you come across a particular bread recipe, then, you probably want to index it: bread:sourdough bread:banana and so on. And since people have different opinions about whether banana bread is really cake or bread, you'll probably want a few things to show up in both, as well as just making lots of cake entries: cake:banana bread cake:eating it too It's also nice to be able to set up a bunch of alternate phrases to be indexed every time the main phrase appears. Let's say that you're writing a cookbook for sales in the US and are using the term "apple crisp" for a baked apple dessert with sugared oatmeal topping. You know everyone west of the Mississippi talks about apple crisp, which is right and proper. However, people east of the Mississippi talk about "cobbler" and since you want to sell books everywhere, you figure you should index both "crisp" and "cobbler". Ditto on "hot dishes," which are also known as casseroles. You can use the concordance to set up a mapping between cobbler and crisp, and also a mapping between hotdish and casserole. How It WorksWe created a small recipe book and a concordance for its index. Figure 9-26 shows the words that were in your recipe book and mentioned in the concordance for indexing. Figure 9-26. Words in the example recipe book that were picked up by the concordance, and words not in book that were also indexed
Figure 9-27 shows the concordance and the generated index, and how the concordance affects the index. Figure 9-27. Concordance and corresponding index with key connections highlighted
The actions taken based on the concordance include:
TerminologyIf you want to create one in this procedure, you'll need to know the following terms.
Selecting or Creating a Concordance
To edit it later, select Edit from the concordance dropdown list in the Index and Tables window.
To stop using it, deselect the Concordance option. Inserting an Index Into a Master Document
All parts of an index have their own paragraph formats that you can modify. Click in a line of the table of contents, and the name of the style is highlighted in the Stylist under paragraph styles. Formatting and Editing an IndexThe principles and procedure for formatting and editing an index are the same as that for formatting and editing a table of contents. See Formatting and Editing a Table of Contents on page 339. Updating or Deleting an IndexThe procedure is the same as that for updating a table of contents. See Updating or Deleting a Table of Contents on page 342. Note With indexes but not tables of contents, you have to be careful what you select. You can't select the final carriage return of the generated index or you won't see the Remove Index option. The figure at right shows the correct way to select an index in order to delete it; the dark area shows what should be selected; note the final line is partly light, showing it's not selected.
Tips for Troubleshooting IndexesIndexes never end up perfect the first time. In order to fix an index, you really should fix the index entries rather than editing the index itself, then update the index. Unfortunately, there's no streamlined way to jump from an index item to the index marker in the document to fix it. You have to hunt and peck through the document(s), which can be really time-consuming . Use the following tips to help with the troubleshooting process.
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