Category Archives: Indexing

I started indexing a book yesterday, and I wanted to work on the text of the document in electronic form, with page breaks that matched those of the galleys, which had already been typeset in QuarkXPress. After a little experimentation, I figured out the following procedure: 1. Ask the typesetter to provide a postscript file, […]

In last week’s newsletter, I promised to show you the perfect example of when to use a double-column concordance in preparing an index, and an automatic way to create such a concordance. The perfect example is a poetry anthology, but almost any consistently structured compilation of articles or addresses will lend itself to this kind […]

Recent articles in this newsletter have discussed editing with a concordance, which may be confusing for some readers. Let me explain. In those articles, “concordance” really means “word list.” It’s simply a list of all the words in a document, and it can come in pretty handy in editing. Experienced Word users know, however, that […]

Working on an index this week, I needed to ensure that pagination of the document I was indexing matched another document in which pagination had already been set. Because of the complexity of the material, I had to do this manually and visually, paging down in document 1, switching to document 2, paging down again, […]

Microsoft Word uses what’s known among professional indexers as “embedded indexing.” That means the index entries are placed as codes in the text of the document being indexed. Then, later, the codes are used to generate the index automatically. (You can learn more about using Word’s indexing features by searching for “Index” in Word’s Help […]

Last week’s newsletter explained how to sort Word’s index entries letter by letter rather than word by word: Using "Found" Macros But it didn’t explain how to do it in an automated way. So here’s an automated way, using wildcard Find and Replace. You can learn more about using wildcards in some of our past […]

If you’ve used Microsoft Word’s Index feature, you know that Word alphabetizes index entries word by word, like this: New Deal New World Newborn News release Most indexers and publishers, however, prefer to sort index entries letter by letter, like this: Newborn New Deal News release New World Is there a way to get Word […]