Generating Indexes

[Combs, Richard]

Stuart Rogers wrote: 
 
> If you do a lot of indexing, the best money you'd ever spend would be
> on
> buying IXGen from http://www.fsatools.com/

I'll second that. And not just for regular indexes and their markers, but for managing any kind of markers and indexes/lists.

> It is wise to have hypertext links in a PDF that is used online (and
> unwise not to) because it's difficult to navigate by page number in a
> PDF (especially if there is front matter numbered in roman numerals
> that
> displace page "1" several pages into the file.  An index without
> hypertext links would annoy most users, I think.

The page numbering in the PDF can be easily fixed with another eminently cost-effective plugin, PageLabeler from Rick Quatro (frameexpert.com). Set it up once for your book (2-3 clicks), and from then on, the page numbering in PDFs will match the page numbering in FM (and in the page footers themselves). 

For instance, the first TOC page in my books is usually page iii. The numbering switches from roman to Arabic and restarts on the first page of Chapter 1. 

Thanks to PageLabeler, Acrobat/Reader shows the first TOC page as "iii (3 of 382)" and the first page of Chapter 1 as "1 (13 of 382)." For folio-numbered docs, it properly adds the chapter prefix, so for instance, the first page of Chapter 3 might appear as "3-1 (87 of 382)." 

And as I said, you spend 20 seconds setting this up once for a book, and you never have to worry about it again. Well worth the $40. 

Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
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