John O'Gorman wrote:
I am embarking on creating an index for a manual of about 200 pages
(written in LyX of course).
I studied up all the advice I could find, and as a result set out to
produce a list of all the unique words in the book.
There are plenty of word you don't want to index. "The" should be
an obvious one. I.e. don't index anything that you really expect the
reader to know already.
Seeing that it is a manual, limit your indexing further to only
words and concepts relevant to whatever the manual is about.
Alas it came to over 3000 words. Even going through and removing the
little works like and, the, but, etc would be an enormous and tedious
task.
Sure, making an index is a big job. Expect to spend some time
if you want it to be good. I did it the other way around, I
read the manuscript and indexed every important concept
I came across.
Also, whenever you put something in the index, think:
1. Is this word/concept something readers of this manual actually
might want to look up? You don't have to index something just
because you wrote about it. Only index it if it is likely to be looked for.
Would you look for that word?
2. Assuming the answer to the previous question is yes, don't fall in the
trap of indexing every occurence of that word. Sure - a computer can
easily do just that for you - and the approach is so wrong. When you
look for something, do you want to see:
concept, 1,3,5,9,12-47,54,66-97,180,182,190-196
It is not very likely that you're going to look up all that, is it?
My publisher told me to only index the most important places
a word is used, because that is where people need to be directed.
Only one to three indices for any given word, they said. A manual
might be different from a textbook of course. But still, make sure
you point them to useful places. Such as the definition of/main chapter on
"concept" and such. If "concept" is also mentioned briefly in sentences
such as "also see concept in chapter xx" then you definitely don't want
an index entry to point there.
Also, if there is a chapter or big section on "concept", just index the
start
of it. "concept" may be mentioned several times in that text over several
pages - indexing all of it does not make sense. People will want to
be directed to the start - the index is normally _not_ for documenting
every occurence of some word.
Helge Hafting
