Dan's book

[Jeanne A. E. DeVoto]

At 9:26 AM -0800 2/28/2004, Dan Shafer wrote:
>Of what earthly value is an index in an electronic book you can 
>search? Isn't an index sort of redundant? I've never once seen a PDF 
>book with an index I thought was at all useful.

Indexes actually can be very useful even in searchable documents:

- To provide a pointer to the main place that a commonly-used word is 
discussed (imagine searching for "field", for example).

- To make synonyms accessible (someone new to Revolution might look 
for "code window" instead of "script editor", for instance, or 
"subroutine" instead of "handler"). Index entries such as "code 
window, see script editor" can help lead a reader to the right place, 
where a full-text search would turn up no hits.

- To make browsing easier, especially with 2-level index entries 
like, for example:
   fields
     changing text in
     creating
     HTML and
     locked and unlocked
     searching in

An index is just one more structured tool for presenting a book's 
contents. Full-text search is also very useful, but since it's 
unstructured by its nature, the useful area of searching isn't the 
same as the useful area of using an index, although they do overlap.

(This is all assuming a good index, of course. If the index is 
mechanically generated, or created by an indexer who isn't familiar 
with the book's subject, fuhgeddaboutit. ;-)
-- 
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ jaed at jaedworks.com
http://www.jaedworks.com