The American Society for Indexing held its 2021 Virtual Conference, “Get Your Indexing Shot in the Arm,” on Friday, April 30, 2021 and Saturday, May 1, 2021. Three sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
In the second session on Saturday, Embedded Indexing: Tackling the Enigma, Devon Thomas and Heather Pendley discussed how embedded indexing differs from back-of-the-book in terms of both book production and indexing processes. They gave examples of several kinds of embedded indexes and an overview of the tools used to create them.
The main differences are as follows:
- The files you get are not in final format. Sometimes, there are multiple files (one for each chapter) or normalized files.
- The files often need to be checked out and checked back in using a version control system.
- When embedding tags, you are working within the system used to produce the book, such as Word, InDesign, or XML-coded text files.
- The native system often has limitations on the appearance or structure of the index.
- After embedding index tags, you need to use the native system to generate a formatted version of the index.
- When editing your index, you should locate the index tags in the source files and edit them one by one. Word and InDesign let you jump to the index tag from the generated index. With text files, you need to open all of the source files in your editor and do a global search.
The presenters emphasized the importance of charging more for embedded indexes, allowing more time to create embedded indexes, and exploring available tools to speed and ease the process.
In the next blog posting I will discuss the third Saturday session of the ASI 2021 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.