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What's the recommended approach to generating an index for an RPG book?
What to do (i.e. what should be in the index) and also how to do it? (We're using Pagemaker for the layout, if that makes any difference.)

Hi Juergen,

I hope a lot of people will respond to this thread, because there are so many options available. Here's what I do.

1) "Compile" the index. This is exactly what people did before there were typewriters, much less computers. It means going through the text by hand and finding every word that you want to be in the index. You don't have to record the page number at this time, just the words.

2) Create an "Index" style (in the Word document, if that's what you're using, which I do) and tag every use of those words with that Style. Again - very important - by hand, not using an automated Search.

3) Then your incredibly smart layout guy is able to generate the final index after the layout of all the non-index pages.

But - I know that this is only one of dozens of methods. I have yet to hear of any automated method that is any good. For instance, no one wants to have every mention of the word "cell" in a biology textbook, and similarly, an index entry for "character" or "roll" in a role-playing game which included every mention would be useless.

Best,
Ron

Some of the newer automated methods are decent - in that they force you to do things by hand. I can't speak for PageMaker or Quark, but in Serif's PagePlus, my layout tool of choice, you do basically what Ron says:

You go through the document by hand and mark spaces where you want index entries. At each space, you mark the index entry name you want - you can even include sections and sub-entries. Then, you use the index tool, which creates a complete index from everything you've marked.

I did the Index for Dreamwalker by hand more or less and it was a two part process.

I took a copy of the original Dreamwalker.doc (using MS Word), and went through it page by page on the computer, deleting everything except the chapter headings and the words I wanted to include in the index.  This left me with a bunch of words separated by chapters which I saved as index.doc.

Part two of the process was getting the final hardcopy proof back for review, then going through and writing in the page numbers after the words on the index.doc.  I did it this way because of course, when the book is laid out, the pages are different than the .doc.  

I then did a "sort text" application on the .doc which gave me an alphabetical listing of all the words followed by the page numbers and bang! there was my index, which I sent back to be included in the book.  

I'm _sure_ there is an easier way to do this but I was/am not nearly computer saavy enough to try anything else.  

Good luck!

Pete

Thanx for the replies so far. So it seems it is what I thought it would be - much work ;) Keep the recommendations coming...

All of the replies so far seem to indicates the same thing: hand markup, with an automated tool to generate an index from the markup (in Ron's case, automated tool == paid lackey).

Even LaTeX, that paragon of automated cross referencing, using the same procedure.  There's a special index tag that doesn't do anything in the text, but generates an entry into an index table, which another program formats for you.  I played with it once, a few years ago, and ultimately decided that I prefered a detailed Table of Contents to introducing that much complexity into a not-for-profit enterprise.

Hi All,

I wasn't going to post here but I just wanted to interject.  In Quark, you can create an automated index by assigning stylesheets to your topic headings as you create the index or in some apps bookmark them.  Once you use the auto index creator it will generate an automatic TOC for you based on the style sheets that you specified.

Topic selection can be up to you or you can specify all headings to be indexed.

Regards