Quick Indexer
by David Spencer

This application is a quick index generator for DTP packages.

Unless you have a DTP package with index generation built in, indexing even the shortest of booklets can be a nightmare. All too often you see books and manuals either without indexes, or with very sparse ones - simple for the author but a pain for the reader. The QIndex application on this disc aims to make indexing simpler by taking a file that lists the desired index entries page-by-page and converting it into a proper alphabetical index that can be imported into any DTP package, word processor or text editor.

USING QINDEX
Running the application installs an icon on the icon bar. QIndex takes as its input a special file that lists on a page-by-page basis the words that are to appear in the index, and this must be created using Edit or similar as described below. Before starting though, make sure that the document being indexed is in its final form so that the pagination will not change. When you're sure everything is all right take a printed copy of the manuscript and go through page-by-page marking the words that should appear in the index.

When all the words have been marked, the input file can be created. The format of the file should be a page number preceded by an '=' sign followed by the index entries for that page, one per line. This should be repeated for each page. A sample file is shown below. It is a wise idea to start every entry with a capital, not just for appearance, but also to ensure the index is sorted correctly, otherwise lower case entries would appear after all the upper case ones. If a page has no entries then it can be omitted. Incidentally, if an entry starts with an '=', this must be replaced with '==' to prevent it being read as a page number. The '==' will be converted to '=' in the final index, and also leading and trailing spaces will be stripped off entries. Should the document's pagination change at any time, the input file can be updated simply by moving the position of the page numbers, as the word order should not have changed.

=1
Cambridge
Archimedes
Acorn
RISC Developments
=2
Computer
Electronic
CPU
Memory
ROM
RAM

Once the input file has been finished you should save it and drag it to the icon bar icon. After the index has been compiled, which can take a minute or more for long files, a standard save box will pop up from which the index file can be saved. This file, the exact format of which can be changed as described below, contains the entries listed in alphabetical order followed by a list of pages on which that word appears. This file can be pasted into just about any DTP package with only a bit of formatting needed to produce the final index.

If Select is clicked on the icon bar icon, a window will pop up. Dragging the index file into this window will set that file to be the input file, and clicking on Run will then run the indexer (which will have exactly the same effect as simply dragging the file to the icon bar icon). However, there is one option in the window which can be changed first: Use page ranges. If this is turned off, then page ranges will be shown as 10, 11, 12 (for example), and if it is turned on, then they will be shown as 10-12.

CUSTOMISING QINDEX
To make QIndex as flexible as possible, it can be customised to some extent by changing lines 150 to 180 in the Basic file !QIndex.QIndex. The variables sep1$ to sep4$ control the formatting. sep1$ is used to separate the entry from the first page number and is a tab by default. sep2$ is used between two page numbers, sep3$ separates the start and end of a range of pages, for example 30-40, and sep4$ (a linefeed by default) terminates each line.

 RISC User 1993
