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Kalpana Thakar is <<...currently working on a... lenghty
manual... in Word. I need to create an Index for this manual.
When is the best time to create an Index... once I have
completed the manual or can I start creating an Index right
now when I am 80% through...?>>
Depends on how you're planning to create the index,
combined with what technique best fits your personal style.
The professional indexers I've talked to usually get a
completed manual (or individual completed sections) to work
with, so they don't have a choice: they wait until the manual
is complete. The professional writers I've talked to who
double as indexers tend to do the work while they write (by
embedding index tags in the document), since this avoids the
potentially considerable delays that arise from waiting until
everything is complete (it never is) to index the manual. As a
nonprofessional and very occasional indexer, I prefer to do
the index by hand after the text is complete; if I had to index
for a living, I'd bite the bullet and learn to index while I wrote.
The only real problem I can think of concerning indexing as
you write involves cross-referencing: if you don't know what
related topics exist, it's pretty hard to create "see also"
references. But with luck, you've got a good product
overview to work from, so that won't be a problem.
