Anthony Campbell wrote:
I find that if I have more than a few index entries for a word they
overrun and are printed on top of other entries in the adjacent
column. This is in 1.5.2 but it also happened in 1.5.1. A bug?
Strange. Too many index entries merely breaks the
line like this for me:
overindexed: 1,3,5,7,9-11
13-16, 45, 48, 49, 54, 56
I could prevent this to some extent by changing to a smaller font for
the whole index but I can't seem to do this. Putting latex commands to
change the font after "Index" at the end of the book doesn't do it.
Is there a way to alter the size of the text used by the index, or --
even better -- to stop the overlapping in the first place?
On the other hand, are you sure you really needs many
entries for one word? This depends a lot on how the index
is used. For a textbook, note that students usually
only ever look up a few of the entries. They simply don't bother
looking up all of 11 entries. So for such books, try sticking to
a maximum of three or so entries per word. Fewer is better.
That's what my publisher told me, at least.
A word may be mentioned a lot througout a book, but this fact
is usually of no interest to the reader. The reader usually
wants to look up the one or two _important_ places,
such as the definition and the main explanation. And perhaps
another case. If they have to look up 20 times, then they just
skim through the book because that is less hassle and
almost as fast.
Now, there are exceptions where one really needs lots
of indexes for a word, but make sure you really need that
before you do it. Don't add lots of indexes just because
you can do it.
Helge Hafting
