Indexing: Introduction and Overview

Nota Bene's indexing functionality is extremely powerful -- much more sophisticated than you will find in any other word processor. With it you can produce indexes with the kinds of features and functionality specified by major style manuals. For example, almost everything described in the lengthy chapter on indexing in The Chicago Manual of Style can be produced automatically by NB. You can generate a wide variety of indexes, from a single general index, on the one hand, to multiple, complex, highly customized indexes on the other.

Bear in mind, however, that indexing is an art. While a computer program can save you dozens, and even hundreds, of hours of work, no computer program can substitute for a knowledgeable indexer who knows the material in the manuscript and understands the intended audience.

The process of creating an index for a document involves two steps: marking the document (that is, selecting what terms will be listed in the index), and generating the index. When you mark a word for inclusion in the index, Nota Bene places an IM (Index Marker) command in the document. When you generate the index, the program uses these IM markers to find the terms to include. In Page Layout view, the presence of an IM command is indicated by a non-printing small red square. This marker can be turned off using the Command Display Options dialog (Shift+F10). For more information, see Markers and Index Markers in Codes View.

Note that if the publisher of your manuscript uses a program other than Nota Bene, their page breaks may differ from the ones in your NB version. To ensure that the page numbers in your index are accurate in these cases, you will need to manually insert page breaks in your manuscript wherever the pages will break in the final book. Before inserting the page breaks, set the default page length in your document so that the page is longer than the publisher's page (click Format, Page Layout, click the Paper tab, and under Paper Size, select Legal). To insert a page break, place your cursor at the end of the word where the your publisher's page breaks, then press Enter to create a new line. Then go back to the end of the previous line and press Ctrl+Enter to insert a hard page break. If you are producing camera-ready copy in Nota Bene, then you do not need to insert hard page breaks.

If you are interested in producing multiple indexes or in using some of Nota Bene's more complex indexing functionality, it is recommended that you read the Index Marking Overview and the Index Generation Overview before you begin. Further documentation in Help provides information on navigating the main dialogs associated with marking an index (the Index: Mark Entries dialog, Index: Mark Toolbar, the Index: Auto Mark dialog) and generating an index (the Index: Generate dialog and the Index: Configure dialog).

To get a feel for the steps required to produce an index, you can try producing a simple index.

1	Place your cursor on each word that you want to include in the index and press Alt+F8 to mark a single word exactly as it appears in the document.

2	After you have completed marking all of the words to appear in the index, save your file (press Ctrl+S or click File, Save). [Note that you will not be able to generate an index for an untitled document.]

You can now generate your index by clicking Tools, Page Indexes, Generate. The preexisting General Index will already be selected in the Index: Generate dialog. Press the Generate button. A fully formatted index containing all of the marked terms in your document will appear in a new, untitled file.