Speaking of indexing...

[Joanne Sprott]

Thanks, Dori. My working partner Sue (also a great graphic designer) and 
I are a couple of the ones that actually enjoy indexing, but not 
necessarily the tedious part. We have professional standalone indexing 
software that takes out most of the tedium. I really feel for those who 
have to do indexes from scratch using the highly clunky and inadequate 
embedded indexing features in documentation development software. No one 
has yet figured out how lovely it would be to make those programs more 
efficient and flexible. There are a couple of independently-written 
add-ons to FrameMaker and Word that help make the editing/revising of 
indexes a bit easier, but "tagging" is still an extra task of the 
indexing process for me that's independent of index composition. I find 
that it's actually faster to build a standalone index in my professional 
software first, put it in page number order and then go through and 
insert the markers/elements/tags, whatever you call them, as a last 
separate step. By building the index first, I can see the whole thing 
and get it structured right so that I don't have to make hardly any, if 
any, corrections after I've embedded the markers/tags and generated the 
index the first time. 

The big challenge these days, as you illustrated, is writing, and 
indexing, for single-sourcing situations. More and more of my tech doc 
clients are having writers work on single-subject or feature modules 
that are placed in more than one document or type of output (print, web, 
help systems), which makes the composition of an index in the usual way 
impossible. A controlled vocabulary based on the actual content of a 
spectrum of docs seems to be the only way to get the index for a 
generated document to come out with any consistency. It's an interesting 
new challenge for us to help folks get something like a quality index 
(particularly for print versions) with single-sourcing.

We indexers seem to have our own weird mindset that makes us like this 
part. Most authors/writers don't seem to like doing indexes at all. :-)

Joanne

AfterWords Editorial Services
Joanne Sprott and Sue Gaines
713-252-1945
PMB 113
9597 Jones Road
Houston, Texas 77065
joanne at aweditorial.com <mailto:joanne at aweditorial.com>
sue at aweditorial.com <mailto:sue at aweditorial.com>
http://www.aweditorial.com
 



Dori Green wrote:
> I'm just finishing a detailed index for our 50-page ISO-modelled quality
> manual.  It will take another day of editing and consolidating before it's
> ready for use by readers who are not familiar with ISO, and by me to
> identify and replace repetitions of information with a reference to its
> first instance -- you guessed it, to prepare the entire program for
> single-sourcing and paragraph linkages.  If I have my way, it will be
> translated into html if not xml.  But that's another topic and another
> fight.  At the least, I expect that I will be able to convince my boss to
> let me cross-link common information to a single source even if I have to do
> it through a mail-merge setup.
>
> Indexing is not my favorite thing upon which to spend time.  (...up with
> which I shall not put.)
>
> But I do count it in my TW bag of tricks, and I'm thankful that my boss did
> agree to let me spend time on it.  This one has so far taken almost a week.
>
> The technique to "rough out" the index in MS Word is simple enough; a
> temporary typist could have done it while I worked on more challenging
> documentation.  Oh well.  Maybe next time.
>
> My brain is fried in three days of tedium.  I could not _imagine_ doing
> nothing but indexing for an extended period of time, or as the main focus of
> my career.  My hat's off to them what does just that.
>
> Dori Green
>
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