General ⇒ Indexing strategy

[meho_r]

Hi,

The publishing house I work for has plans to publish a multivolume book (about 15 volumes with 700-800 pages each). We've been discussing about indexing strategy, but haven't decide anything yet. I would like to know which approach is the best. All suggestions are very welcome

- All materials will be prepared in MS Word's .doc format and delivered to me
- I'm using Kile for preparing books

I think that each book will have index at it's end (not in separate book for index only). Since I don't expect that anyone I'll be working with on this project use LaTeX, .doc is starting point so some kind of conversion will be necessary. I also expect that I'm not the one who will be preparing index but some student and in that case it will most likely be done in MS Word. Any advice?

Thanks

[meho_r]

Really no one? Nothing?

[Juanjo]

I admit that I don't really understand the problem. You receive the preliminary version of a book collection, each volume written in .doc format. After some kind of conversion, you prepare the final version with LaTeX. So, I think that the indexing should be done at the same time. One of the great advantages of LateX is precisely that indexes and glossaries can be automatically generated. While you edit the books, you insert \index commands where appropriate and then MakeIndex, combined with LaTeX, yields a beatiful index. Why to rely on Word and on a different person to do this task?

[meho_r]

It's not up to me, really. I know that creating an index during preparing a document in LaTeX is the best way and I usually do that way. About conversion, I export text from .doc to .txt and then work with it. I know there are some converters .doc to .tex, but don't like "code mess" they make The problem is that I lose indexed entries when .doc is exported to .txt. So, what can be done in that regard? How to "regain" indexed entries from .doc? I can follow entries manually but that will be hard job...

[Juanjo]

The problem is that I lose indexed entries when .doc is exported to .txt. So, what can be done in that regard? How to "regain" indexed entries from .doc? I can follow entries manually but that will be hard job...

For the people writing the .doc version of the books, it has no sense to do some formatting or indexing "in the Word way", since all this will be lost, as you say. So the only solution I see is to ask them for some cooperation. They could simply mark index entries "in a LaTeX friendly way", for example, writing \i{foo} instead of foo. This is a bit annoying for them: they have to type some extra characters that indeed make a bit difficult the reading. But it helps you a lot: you only have to search and replace \i by \index and arrange those entries requiring a special formatting. Perhaps you and your team can fix a short "markup language" for index entries: \i for normal entries, \b for entries in bold letters, and so on.