On Wednesday 24 October 2007 17:00, Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरोनया] wrote:
> Is there some way I can automate the generation of a Lyx index?
> Manually selecting all the entries (multiple times) can be tiresome
> and time-consuming... FN
The following answer to your question is my subjective opinion -- treat it as
such.
You could write a script to generate index entries, but the result would be a
disservice to your readers. Having an index entry for every occurrence of a
word, which is what would be produced by an index-entry-making script, would
produce many irrelevent index entries, and drown the important entries in a
sea of irrelevencies.
Not only that, but in many cases you need to mark a range of pages as an index
entry (using |( and |)), and that could not be produced with an
index-entry-making script.
As a result, index entries must be input by hand. It's the most boring, dirty,
distasteful work an author does, but it's necessary to produce a product
useful to the reader. Here's how I do it:
1) I write the LyX file out to text.
2) Using Vim, I put each word on its own line
A: %s/\s\s*/\r/g
3) I run the resulting file through sort -u
4) I now have an alphabetized list of every word in the book. For each word, I
think of all book relevent phrases that could be made with that word. I add
such phrases to the list. If the word is not important, nor is it part of a
relevent phrase, I delete it from the list. Generally speaking, I can delete
all non upper case words 4 letters or less. That gets rid of a heck of a lot
of stuff at once.
5) When finished with step 4, I have a list of every desired index item.
Starting at the top, I go through the book and find all occurrences I wish to
index, and mark them.
The preceding took me about a day for an 80 page book. It's a horrible job,
but if you self publish you've gotta do it.
HTH
SteveT
Steve Litt
Books written in LyX:
Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist
Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting: Just the Facts
