On 2/12/07, G. Roderick Singleton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Now to see if I can get the index completed so we can do it. :-)
I don't know what tools you are working with. But there are tools available specifically designed for creation of back-of-the-book-style subject matter indexes. OOo lags in that regard. Most of the really powerful tools are proprietary and expensive. However, if you already have a copy of WordPerfect, you might consider using it to generate the index's concordance file. WordPerfect 10 and later ship with a macro extension feature called Concord for generating concordance files. However, I would highly recommend instead using the original developer's scripts. <http://www.wptoolbox.com/library/Unique.html>. As noted on the linked page, Concord has not been updated since WordPerfect 10 and its documentation is less than sterling. The Unique scripts do not suffer from the same defects. The linked page has a good overview of the scripts' features. But in summary, they are a set of tools for extracting unique words from a document and manipulating them in various ways such as normalizing capitalization and lower case instances of words. Here is the author's introductory paragraph: "This macro creates an alphabetical list of all the different words found in a document. It copies one example of each of the different words to a second "concordance" document window which, in turn, can be saved and used to index the main document. The macro searches body text, and (optionally) footnotes, endnotes, headers, footers, and graphic boxes. Other options allow for excluding minor words, numbers, or including short phrases by marking them while the macro plays." When indexing a large document, it is generally far less work to delete unwanted words from an automatically generated concordance file than it is to manually build a concordance file from scratch one term at a time. I'll echo here something I've said several times before on this list: If any OOo scripters are looking for inspiration for new extensions, the linked web site is a gold mine. The author is a retired gentleman whose hobby is developing WordPerfect scripts requested by users to solve real issues and reflect quality user feedback in their development. All of his own scripts ("Library" tab) are heavily commented as a teaching device and their functionality is well summarized on the web site. He also has a large collection of useful scripts contributed by other authors ("Other authors" tab). Hope this helps, Marbux --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
