On Mar 29, 2009, at 6:24 PM, Mike Beggs wrote:
> I'm curious as to how the professionals index... just by reading
> through and
> noting the topics as you go along?
Yes. Back when I was doing it, from the early 1980s through the early 1990s, we got the pages as xeroxed proofs - not electronically. I wrote some rather primitive software to do it in the early 1980s (on my primitive CP/M Z-80 Vector Graphic machine). I typed in the entries, and the software sorted and formatted it. But the finished product still required a lot of editing. You had to standardize language and try to anticipate what readers would look for, which meant either some redundancy or cross-referencing. You start with the words on the page, but it's only a start. I did the indexes for Wall Street and After the New Economy using PageMaker and InDesign's indexing capabilities on files that I'd laid out myself, which simplified the process some, but not as much as you might guess.
Doug