Pavel Sanda wrote:
Rich Shepard wrote:
It can take an amateur like me
almost as long to prepare the index as it does to write the text. Like
just an idea - couldn't be this a bit automatized? something like export to
plain text, sort & uniq all words by alphabet, manually delete the boring words
(shouldn't be too much in tech documentation) and then run some script mapping
it back into the text.
this would probably cause some problems for multiple-word entries and languages
with too many word inflections and so on, but only experiment probably tells...
There is also the problem that you often don't want to index every case
of an otherwise interesting word. Some types of litterature demands
this, and then automating it helps. (Advanced search & replace might
also help - e.g. replace "concept" with "concept+indexentry[concept]"
and then hit "replace all".)
However, this is often not what you want. Students seeing an index
like "concept: 1, 3, 5 ,7 ,9-11, 15-22, 34, 86-99, 101" despair. Testing
shows that they only look up the first few entries. In such cases, you
index the 2-3 most important occurences. Such as the definition, an
explanation, and perhaps an interesting example. Too much choice is not
good. A word may be mentioned in a footnote somewhere, without this
being an interesting place to look for said word.
Helge Hafting
