Some Pointers for IXgen

[Frank Stearns]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, John Posada wrote:

> Hi, guys...this will be the first time I'm using IXgen to generate a
> set of index sections. Let me know if what I want to do is
> unreasonable.
>
> My document set contains about eight book, with four of them over (or
> close to over) 200 pages. I want to generate an index for each
> book...don't worry, I don't want a master index (at least not yet).
> However, I want to apply the same list of words and phrases against
> each book.
>
> What I envision is to index each book, then merge the words and
> phrases into one master list. When it comes time to gen the index,
> use the same list for each book.
>
> This sound reasonable? I'm going to be studying the manual. However,
> in the mean time, can someone give me a very highlevel description of
> how I'll approach this?

Quite reasonable, and you can mix and match the IXgen tools to accomplish 
this.

If you go to the section in the IXgen User's Guide entitled "Suggested 
IXgen Uses (Cookbook)" you'll find several short "step by step" procedures 
for real-world use of IXgen. You don't have to be an expert IXgen user to 
go through these procedures.

You might start with the procedure from "Making an Index from Scratch" on 
one book, then you could try "Making a Keyword List from an Existing 
Index" to get you going with the other books.

Those are all fairly "high level" in their explanations (they're cookbook 
procedures, after all), plus you'll have an index when you're done.

Just be aware of the limitations of an index produced by "keyword 
only" methods -- as time allows, you'll want to massage the index for 
*each* book to get something that will make your readers smile.

You might want to try out a few things on a scatch copy of one of the 
books until you get the hang of things.

Hope that helps,

Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r)
franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com>
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