DTP: Numbering Pages, Part 17: Automated Indexes.

The previous installment in this series explained the creation of automated tables of contents and page numbers in books and booklets.

Indexes are more difficult to prepare than tables of contents.

As you know, indexes usually appear in the back of the book, in contrast to tables of contents, which are in the beginning. To the best of my knowledge, the only exception to this rule is the World Almanac and Book of Facts. That book places a rather comprehensive index in the front.

Another book with an extremely large index is the traditional, standard, Roget's Thesaurus. That index takes up nearly half of the book. The Thesaurus is, after all, a book of words. Every single word must be indexed. It should come as no surprise that the index is so bulky, despite the fact that it has a number of columns.

The indexes in your book could also conceivably include every word. However, that is unlikely. Such a bulky addendum would be exceedingly and unnecessarily large. Most books, with the exceptions of the examples listed above, do not require such large indexes.

For this reason, indexing programs ignore words such as a, an, the, him, her, she, or it, and a large glossary of other such words that are of value. In serious book publications, a human goes through that index and removes additional unnecessary words that are of no benefit.

Today's desktop publishing programs do not necessarily have the top indexing and table of contents features, but some word processors do include them.

The indexing program indicates the page on which any important key word is located. If you subsequently edit your text, then run the indexing program again, so that it will update the page numbers.

This system provides a major advantage over the previous, manual indexing system. In the past, authors could not make any changes that would cause the last word in a page to shift, because that would destroy the laborious work invested in preparing the index. If a word was added to a page, another word of the same length would have to be edited out. Thus, if a company edited out two lines of text, then they would be allowed to put back those two lines, but not three lines or one line. All changes had to match the original format.

Today's automatic indexing programs make this issue irrelevant.

Page numbers had impeded progress in the past. Today's automatic page numbering system allows us to update, edit, and modify books at will, without worrying about the table of contents or index.

Click here for the next article in this series, which discusses the future of word processing and desktop publishing.