Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Secondly, the lack of understanding, of most people, of the reality of indices--it's boggling. (@AlexHoang, this is absolutely NOT directed at you; we've had some run-ins about indices, at my shop lately, and I'm taking this moment to spew a bit.)
|
lol. Yep AlexHoang, you just landed in an age-old discussion. Me + Hitch have discussed Indexes a ton on MobileRead. :P
(It also gets brought up every so often when people also bring up "Page Numbers" in ebooks.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
We've had clients that want us to magically take the index from a previously-printed book, make a new printed book (with new paging and page numbers, right?) and somehow, "convert" the old index to work in the new. Uh...nope? I mean, can you imagine the time and effort in that? You'd have to read the entire bloody book, and then work through the index, item by item, and try to figure out what it was, on original page 36, that the indexer thought was worth noting, and then find it in the new, re-tag it, lather-rinse-repeat for a thousand index entries, and then generate a new index.
|
Yep, I know that game. The screenshot I shared above was from a book I've been retypesetting over years. It took me
months to recreate the Index, and I'm still not done with it. I wrote about that experience in previous threads. (Indexes are incredibly information-dense, and thousands of cross-references can be condensed into a very small amount of space.)
And like Hitch mentioned, you can't just "renumber the Index", you have to actually reread the entire page and figure out WHAT exactly the Indexer was referencing:
Take an example "Poodles, 15":
- Was it just a single word "poodle" in Page 15?
- Or were the top-to-bottom paragraphs all discussing "poodles"?
- Imagine in your new PDF: Old Page 15 top paragraph = New Page 20 bottom of the page.
- All of a sudden, a single page reference in the Index: 15 can become "20-22"
Now what if there was a "Dogs, 15"?
- Did the Indexer mean the same exact reference as the single "poodle" sentence?
- Or did the rest of the page have other discussions about dogs?
... multiply that work by 100, 200, 500, or however many individual PAGE NUMBERS appear in your Index... and you can see how the amount of time to recreate an Index properly explodes exponentially.
And things can only get more complicated from there (introduce footnotes, book titles, full author names, same things in different categories, [...]).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
If you're a non-fiction author, before you publish, learn how indices are made, not only through some "Then A Miracle Occurs" mindset, but the actual mechanics. Unless you get picked up by Random House, pal, you're going to need to handle it yourself, so, learn now. Save your designer some hassle.
|
Indexing is also a highly specialized skill. And in order to create a fantastic Index, you also have to be extremely well-versed in the subject matter + "know HOW a typical reader will approach this book", because you have to categorize the text as well.
Think to something like a cookbook, a single recipe can belong under multiple categories:
Chicken Noodle Soup:
- Soups > Chicken Noodle
- Main Ingredients > Chicken > Chicken Noodle Soup
- Crockpot Recipes > Chicken Noodle Soup
- Method > Stovetop > Chicken Noodle Soup
Different readers may be approaching the recipes in different ways:
- Some may LOVE chicken and want every chicken recipe
- Others may have a crockpot and set-it-and-forget-it
- Others may LOVE soup