On Sunday 11 November 2001 18:48, Steve Litt wrote: > I need to index my 117,000 word book, written in a slightly modified Book > document class. This thing's much too big to go through every page > inserting indexing entries. What I'd like to do is make a list of words and > terms, and have Lyx place the indexing entries and build the index. > > Worst case I could make a Perl script to find words and phrases, and insert > the indexing entries. But I bet LyX has a built-in method to do this. > > Anyone know? > > Thanks > > Steve
I asked this question 10 days ago, when I was much younger and much more innocent. I've spent the last week indexing my 117,000 word book, and can tell you any automated solution would IMHO create an index useless to the reader. What to include, what to exclude, what to call it, and the desired index hierarchy requires judgement calls based not only on words, but on subtleties of their context. It's a long, hairy process. When I wrote Samba Unleashed, Macmillan had people whose job title was "indexer". These people were experts on indexing a book. Whole books have been written on the subtleties of good book indexing. We're not talking the technology here -- we're talking the organization and inclusion. If you'll be indexing your book, here are some suggestions: * If you use Mandrake, there's a bug covered later in this email. * If you can afford to hire an expert indexer, that might be a good idea. * Make a list of all words in your book, and use that to give you indexing ideas. * Use your table of contents to give you ideas of very important items to be indexed. * Place your list of see's and seealso's directly above the index. Use that list to give yourself ideas about inclusion and hierarchy. * If an indexed word occurs in a heading, you'll probably want to make its entire section a range, using |( in the heading and |) at the end of the section. Then don't search individual occurrences of that index term within the section. * Before beginning your indexing tasks, read the following documentation: ** Extended.lyx->1.3 Making an Index ** Reference.lyx->3.5.3 index-insert, 3.5.4 index-print, ** /usr/share/texmf/doc/makeindex/makeindex.dvi ** In the preceding file, especially read section "When, Why, What and How to Index". It gives you technology-independent indexing rules of the road. ** You may want to skim the VERY difficult doc /usr/share/texmf/doc/makeindex/ind.dvi, but if it confuses you don't. * If you're using Mandrake, there's an auto-indexing bug. The workaround is this shellscript: rm -f $1.aux rm -f $1.dvi rm -f $1.idx rm -f $1.ilg rm -f $1.ind rm -f $1.log rm -f $1.tex rm -f $1.toc lyx --export latex $1.lyx latex $1.tex makeindex $1.idx konqueror $1.ind $1.ilg If $1.ilg shows no warnings or errors, copy $1.ind into the bottom of your document and make it ERT. (Many thanks to Paul Benham for this workaround). If $1.ilg shows errors, look up the page number and nature of those errors in $1.idx, then find the document section(s) for that page in an up-to-date postscript file, and then find the document section in the LyX file and fix the problem. Indexing is like working in the salt mines. It's tedious, uncomfortable, exhausting and error prone. Perhaps this email will at least prevent you from getting stuck on indexing technologies, allowing you more time to get stuck on indexing philosophy. :-) Steve -- Steve Litt Webmaster, Troubleshooters.Com http://www.troubleshooters.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Legal Disclaimer) Follow these suggestions at your own risk.
