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Larry's Bonura's book "The Art of Indexing" is great, especially for
technical writers. Nancy Mulvany has written a similar book which I find is
a little more detailed. It's title is "Indexing Books" and it's published by
the University of Chicago Press. I am a professional indexer, and use both.
For more information, you might try the Society of Indexers http://www.socind.demon.co.uk/ . It's the British indexers' association.
There is also the American Society of Indexers at www.ASIndexing.org .
Large projects such as yours are VERY time consuming. For an adequate index
I suspect it might be at least two weeks worth of work to get a good index.
Mulvany suggests that a good technical work should be a "10 % index" which
means a dense index about 8 to 10 entries per page of text depending on the
length of the manual.
According to Lori Lathrops' Index Estimator a 350 page technical book might
be a 14-17 page index and would take an experienced, professional indexer
about 10 days.
You can find both of these books at www.amazon.com on the Internet.
I hope this helps.
Karen Spern
kspern -at- bestweb -dot- net
-----Original Message-----
>I'm getting more and more familiar with the existing manual and I've found
>that its biggest defect (there's about a zillion others, but I won't bother
>you with them....yet!) is the lack of good indexes. I'm fairly new to
>indexing large, complex documents like this one, so I've decided that I'm
>going to perform a bit of research in this area.
