On Fri, 2003-11-28 at 05:08, Helge Hafting wrote: > Ed Sawicki wrote: > > I love LyX but I dislike the way an index is created. > > The indexed words are turned into boxes on the screen that > > I find annoying. I'd also like a bit more automation to make > > indexing easier. I'm wondering whether I'm overlooking a > > capability in LyX and whether someone has already created a > > solution. > > > > If there's no other solution, here's what I plan: > > > > 1. When the book is finished, convert it to ASCII and LaTex. > > 2. From the ASCII file, create a word list that consists of > > all the words in the book. Pare this list down to only the > > words that should be indexed using some automation and manual > > inspection and editing. > > 3. Add phrases that should be indexed to the list. I'll have to > > maintain a list of phrases manually as I write the book. > > 4. Have a script automatically insert indexing markup into the > > LaTeX file. > > 5. Fix any problems with manual editing of the LaTeX file. > > 6. Use the marked up LaTeX file to print the final book. > > > > Whenever changes to the book are needed, I modify the LyX > > version of the book. When finished, I go to step 1. > > Be careful with "fully automated indexing".
I never intended fully automated indexing. That would be foolish. That's why step 5 exists. Perhaps my wording of step 5 is vague. > Indexing > every page where some word occur usually makes for > a poor index. It is easy, because all you need is to > pick the words and let the computer do the rest. But > the result is rarely good, as a normal text contain > many indexable words in places people aren't interested > in looking up. I agree, though this is less of a problem when the book is about a technical subject and most of the index entries are technical terms. > I've got the following advice on index creation: > 1. Try to not index more than three locations for a word. > People simply don't try 20 locations, so it is > a waste *even* if all of them are equally relevant. > There may be exceptions to this depending on what you're > writing - this is the general advice. > 2. Avoid foo:56,57,58,59 (or foo:56--59) Simply > index the start of the range, people will go there > and read through it. > 3. Index only the important places a word is used. > People looking in the index for "foo" want to > find the important pieces about "foo", not everytime the > word was used. > > This advice is more work and stands in the way of > automation. Still, it usually results in better books. > > Helge Hafting >
