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Old 09-27-2012, 04:15 PM   #114
meme
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Posts: 1,274
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: UK
Device: Kindle PW, K4 NT, K3, Kobo Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck View Post
Yeah, that's... helpful

We tend to omit indices in epubs, even when the DT editions has one. They're a bit superfluous when all readers and software have search functions. If you want to make the index functionality more useful, however, I have a couple of suggestions:
  • Have separate columns for display and hit words; ie for the entry "vehicle" you could have it generate hits for "bus", "car", "boat" and so on
  • Case insensitivity in the generation code. Capitalised words could occur at the start of a sentence.
  • Have it pick up a marker such as a span class instead of all search hits. If England is mentioned many times in a few paragraphs, you really only need a link for the first one. This might be automated from the UI with a "Mark selected for index" button.
  • Possibly make it multilevel. I don't really know how this should be handled in the UI, though.
As I said, at the end of the day I don't believe indexes will be necessary as a lookup tool, but they might be helpful as a "Summary of concepts" touched upon in the book.

On a side note I've been using the beta quite a bit now, and even prepared a commercial book for publication with it (might it be the first one made with the beta?). I love it, you guys have done an outstanding job.

The user guide's a work in progress - and would be a lot easier if we didn't keep changing everything every day

Yes, I know an index isn't needed by most, but a certain person around here once asked about it and it seemed interesting to see what could be done...
  • There are 2 columns - one for the text to match, and one for the text to display - with the display defaulting to the text if you don't enter anything
  • I think I made it case sensitive on purpose in case of proper names, etc. Just use Brown, brown to pick up both (tooltip should mention this)
  • Use Mark for Index on your text and you get a span marker
  • It is multilevel - just use First/Second in the text to use in the index column

Yeah, it is great, isn't it
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