Title:  Open Source indexing

Author: John Culleton

Journal : The Indexer

Vol. 24 No. 2 October 2004

 

The Article on the Open Source indexing written by John Culleton describes about two indexing applications. A simple stand-alone application for the beginners and a more sophisticated software is outlined. To adopt to the full open source method, one has to  go to the uprooting of habits of long standing and accept different changes in indexing.  Generally these two applications use a couple of independently executing programmes. The communication between them take a form of plain text (ASCII) files and the familiar Graphic Interface (GUI) . the application of these two programmes are operated under the guidance of control files which are customised according to the requirement. The control files are also plain text which can be edited. The instructions are based on the assumption of Microsoft Windows and adaption of Linux of Macintosh system is easy.

A simple application for beginners can be done by downloading some software and installing it and flowing the instructions on the sites.  Vim editor. http://www.vim.org 2. TeX typesetting system. http://www.miktex.org In each case the installation instructions on the sites should be studied and followed. After installation the Vim editor program appears in three forms, each with its own icon. The file should be saved immediately. and then the creation of the index can proceed. F keys use to operate.  F2 inserts the sting on the first line. To insert the closing brace in the middle of the process we need to press F3. The sequence of individual lines does not matter. Most pages are generated automatically. The special situations “see” and “see also” will required manual editing .

A full application For a book of any size the manual keying-in of all those page numbers becomes tedious and error-prone. In addition the power of the computer to search out occurrences of terms and index them or bypass them with a keystroke is not used. The next level of Open Source indexing uses a copy of the book itself to establish both the page numbers and the correct spelling of the index terms. Indexing tags are embedded in the text of the book The full method has some significant advantages over any stand-alone program, including all the commercial products. First, since it assigns page numbers automatically to the index items, that tedious and error-prone process is eliminated. Proofreading for correctness of page numbers is eliminated altogether. On the whole the paper explains the concept  of indexing  for beginners and full fledged professional with the different use of keys and customising as  per their convince and comfort level  and also that learning of  the keyboard commands  has a learning curve  and it can be mastered over the journey of learning and using it more frequently.

 

 

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