I'm coming to the end of my non-fiction book, which has topic-based chapters. When I wrote a previous book I got away with a filmography and list of directors but I want to index this one properly. It will also help me to spot repetitions, which is more of a problem with this book than the other. I can go through the thirty or so chapters and make a list of subjects but it occurs to me there may be some kind of software programme I can download or help built into Windows 7.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Sheila

As far as I'm aware, it's usually the publisher does the indexing - are you self publishing? If not, I'd wait

Sheila

In Word 2007 (and earlier versions, I believe) there is an indexing facility.

See Warning below before trying this!

If you have Word 2007, go to the Tab marked References.

Within that tab, there is a box (fifth one across) entitled Index.

Within your text, highlight a word or phrase to be indexed. Then, in the Index box, click on 'Mark Entry'. That indexes the item. When you have a few (or all of them) done, go to the point in the document where you would like the index to appear.

In the Index box, click on Insert Index. Use the dialog box that comes up to format the index (i.e. no of columns to show, etc.). When you click on OK, it will create the index of all the marked items.

If you 'mark' subsequent items, you can go to the index, click in it, the click on Update Index in the Index box. Any new items will be added.

The appearance of the output may not be what you want exactly, but it will facilitate the job for you.

WARNING

I strongly recommend that, before doing this, you copy your document and rename the copy. Then do the indexing on the copy, not on the original.

I say this because, when experimenting as above to do this reply, while the index was created OK, I experienced problems with the document afterwards when trying to change the screen view back to normal without all the indexing and editing characters that appear when you do this operation.

There's a bug in Word relating to this in there somewhere, and I wouldn't want you to screw up your original!

Chris

Hi

I had to do the indexing for my academic book for Palgrave Macmillan. I used the method that Chris describes for building the index in the word document, but first I had to consider what the index would focus on because it would have been impossible to index everything - my available indexing space was six pages and I had to index all major references as well as themes and subjects.

My publisher has indexing guidelines on their website and there is a lot of online advice about building an index. I would leave a week aside at least for this task as once you get started it's really difficult to decide what to leave out.

Hope that helps.

Jx

Thanks to all - this is very helpful. I looked at the Word 7 handbook and must admit I was worried by the reference to rebuilding the index after changing page numbers or inserting new references. I could imagine getting into a right muddle.On a copy sounds good advice.

No, I don't intend to self publish at this stage, although maybe think of e-publishing if it's not taken up. Sounds good if the publisher could do the index - I'll maybe wait and see if I'm asked.Thanks again.

Sheila

Interesting that Palgrave Macmillan wanted you to do it, Karris.

How did it work then? I assumed indexing would be tricky until the book had been typeset, because you wouldn't know how the pagination would work out...? Or did you step in only after it was typeset?

Indexes on ebooks are a really vexed question for this exact reason - because the pagination changes depending on your screen settings. Traditionally they weren't supported, and publishers were advised to leave them out. Now they have various work arounds, but it's quite complicated.

Interesting question, and I'll look into it more online; thanks for the suggestion.

If I take the ebook route I won't do an index. I had always thought it must be complex so hadn't considered it before. However, just recently I read a letter in Writing Magazine from someone who'd indexed the contents of previous issues of the magazine. She was a professional indexer, though.

Sheila

Hi Florapost

As far as I can remember, I generated the index listing from the final word document after the final edits were done, which I sent to the publishers in a wordfile as requested in their guidelines. Then, when it was typset, PM followed the markings in the document to change the pagination in the final typeset index. Then, when I got the final proof for checking, I had to check that the index was correct and to my specification (which involved the labourious task of looking up all the indexed items in the proof)and make any changes.

I wasn't all that keen on doing it, but the editor explained that experience had shown them that indexing by someone who isn't an expert in the subject can sometimes be disappointing, so they prefer some kind of collaboration to produce a useful index.

I've found the indexing link now here

Hope that helps

Jx

Hi Sheila
I have done all the indexes on my non-fiction books (11 in total), the publishers offer to do it but there is often a charge which comes out of the royalties.

Normally I just make a list of the key words that I would need if I were a reader of the book, as well as the key elements that I think are important within the work. Names, places, themes, genres etc.

The page numbers themselves don't need to be put in until you have the final proofs, as once images and formatting have been finalised the page numbers will shift from your original word or PDF doc.

All my publishers will send the final proofs as a PDF to help with the indexing and as a hard copy for marking up. Putting the pages into the index is very boring and time consuming, but a couple of days will do it.

Charlotte

As a non-indexer it sounds to me as if you can get the WP progam to generate the entries, but you still need to decide what the keywords are.

From the reader's point of view, I do think what I suspect are computer-generated indexes are worse than useless, when you look up Kurosawa, and get 50 page numbers with no indication of what any of them mean. Pro indexers know that it

Judith Butcher's bible Copy-Editing has a section on Indexing, and I've seen it in libraries.

Best of luck! I can see it would be fiddly but I'm sure it's true that the specialist does it much better than anyone else. You know what's important.

Re e-books, I assume that to some extent an index is redundant, because you have Search...

A useful facility for identifying individual words (but unfortunately not all of them) that might merit indexing is a word frequency counter.

This will give a list of all the words in descending order of frequency. Among the lower frequency ones will be a lot of the stuff you might want to find and index.

There's one on this site, although I can't see how you get to it via any of the menus.

http://www.writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp

It can take some of the donkey-work out of the selection process.

Chris

Really useful information. I've saved the Index guide to my documents file and the frequency counter will be very useful anyway for review-writing. Indexing is not something I'll look forward to, but I hope there won't be too much of it.

Sheila

I've written... oh I don't know.. about a billion software user guides and they each had an index.

The Microsoft Word index tool is very efficient if you know how it works and can manipulate it.

I used to do it by reading through the text and as soon as I came across a word that needed indexing, I'd mark it. (In Word 2007 it's on the References Tab, click "Mark Entry"), then word offers you the option of "Mark all". So you have the option of allowing the program to search your text and mark all occurrences of the same word.

Once you have done that for all the words you want in the index, go to the end of the file and insert the index itself. It's not particularly hard unless it goes wrong, but the advise that you should do this on a copy of the file is essential.


The issue about updating it is much simpler than it sounds. You just select the index and press F9 (or click "Update Index") and it updates itself.

There is something of a knack to getting satisfying indices. I often found myself struggling to find words beginning with certain letters just to ensure the index was balanced (but then I wasn't writing about a subject anyone would get passionate about), and index sub-entries are an art to themselves. You might find that several iterations are necessary to end up with something you are pleased with.

Andy