Of what earthly value is an index in an electronic book you can search? Isn't an index sort of redundant? I've never once seen a PDF book with an index I thought was at all useful.
Indexes actually can be very useful even in searchable documents:
- To provide a pointer to the main place that a commonly-used word is discussed (imagine searching for "field", for example).
- To make synonyms accessible (someone new to Revolution might look for "code window" instead of "script editor", for instance, or "subroutine" instead of "handler"). Index entries such as "code window, see script editor" can help lead a reader to the right place, where a full-text search would turn up no hits.
- To make browsing easier, especially with 2-level index entries like, for example:
fields
changing text in
creating
HTML and
locked and unlocked
searching in
An index is just one more structured tool for presenting a book's contents. Full-text search is also very useful, but since it's unstructured by its nature, the useful area of searching isn't the same as the useful area of using an index, although they do overlap.
(This is all assuming a good index, of course. If the index is mechanically generated, or created by an indexer who isn't familiar with the book's subject, fuhgeddaboutit. ;-)
--
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.jaedworks.com
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