Generating index
Instead of automatically generating something that is not useable, the reader would far prefer you to express the document electronically and provide a free text search. A free text search serves the reader's needs far better than a badly-constructed index, and the search engines available these days are smart enough to look for what the reader “wanted” rather than what he or she “asked for”.
An experienced technical writer wrote this article. As a technical writer, I produce long documents running to thousands of pages of technical material. Indexes are part of my game. I can't tell you how to produce one automatically, but I can tell you how to produce one easily!
Before 1990-ish, Indexing was a profession of its own; in addition to an Author and an Editor, a large book had an Indexer. Even today, if you are making a book such as a medical encyclopedia that is going to remain in print for many years, it is simply stupid not to use a professional indexer. Really good indexes are an even mix of science and art form, and the quality improvement a professional makes is well worth paying for. Of course, few of us these days work on publications that are going to last long enough to justify this effort. And even fewer of us have the time to produce such an index. If you do have the time, obtain a copy of “Indexing, The Art of” by G. Norman Knight (Allen & Unwin, ISBN 0-04-029002-6). Norman Knight is a former President of The Society of Indexers, and his book is simple and charming. Reading it, you will soon realize that indexing is not difficult; it simply takes attention to detail and patience.
Word has one of the nicest and most powerful index generators around built right in, so you have all the tools you are going to need. You need to allow a week per 500 pages to generate an index in a technical book. Technical publications are fairly “information dense”. Scholarly monographs and the like are usually quicker to index.
In the old days (say, 1995 or thereabouts!) indexes were all produced by the “shoebox” method. They literally used a shoebox into which they inserted index cards: three-inch by five-inch cards upon which they wrote the index term and its page number. The Indexer would sit with a large pile of “galley proofs”, single-page images as they were returned from the typesetter, and go through each one line-by-line seeking and recording the index terms. At the finish, they typed the index out with its page numbers and sent it off to the typesetter for publication. There is a software tool specially built for indexing that emulates this process exactly. I tell you this simply because, in certain circumstances, this method is still the best today. If your document is going to be published from a different computer to the one it is being created on, and that machine cannot interpret Microsoft Word XE tags, and you do not know what the page numbers are yet because the other machine is going to do the pagination, then use the shoebox method!
Word will do two forms of index: The Concordance Index and the Mark-up Index. It will also do something half-way in-between, using its “Mark All” command.
A Mark-up index is the method I recommend. It's quick, accurate, easy to understand, and easy to correct. With a little care in the planning, it normally results in a very useable index.
As the term implies, you produce a mark-up index by embedding mark-up “tags” in the Word document. Word automatically looks up the page numbers at Print time and generates and formats the index for you. Study the help topic “Create an index” and all its sub-topics. This is the way I recommend. It's the way that all good writers create an index these days. Mark by mark, page by page! It is explained in detail below.
I implore you not to waste your time with a Concordance Index for most publications. It results in a huge pile of rubbish that is of very little use to the reader. And it takes nearly as long to make as it does to generate an index properly. The Concordance Index is a hangover from the past when people were desperately hoping to produce an “automatic index” to reduce the labor. Every major word-processor will do them, and no professional writer or editor would, these days, permit one.
To make a Concordance index you make up a table of all the terms you want Word to find in one column, and the index entry you want to see for each term in the other. For more information, see “Create a concordance file” in the Word help file. But the end result is that you have every term indexed at EVERY place it occurs. Most of the mentions of a term in a book are simply passing references: what the reader wants to see in the index is only one page number; the one that contains the main topic for the term. If you send them on a wild goose chase to 20 other places first, they will think most unkindly of you.
The concordance mechanism does have its place: It can often be used to good effect in Reference Books such as Programming Reference Manuals, where each command or function is referred to only in a small section of the text, then rarely mentioned anywhere else in the book.
Technical writers and other folk who publish seriously-huge documents in HTML may want to spend a little time learning about Concordance Indexes. In conjunction with VBA, a concordance index is a great way to automatically generate hyperlinks in your document. You tag every mention of each term with the concordance indexing mechanism, then use VBA to change the tags into hyperlink tags.
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