I’m unfamiliar with .mobi and .epub, but I’m a huge believer in tagged text — no particular format, it might be XML, InDesign tagged text, whatever — and in the ability of text editor programs to re-shape it so that it keeps all relevant info, eventually giving you something that works exactly the way you want it to.

You did a beautiful index, by the way — the main ideas distilled to crystalline purity, like the best gin!

Cheers — Jeremy

Yes, the second big reason is portability and changing the output format, and still having an index. That’s the other big hint we need to send to Adobe – when you output for ePub, InDesign drops all the index entries in the output. At least it did in CS3, I need to check this in CS4. That’s not helpful for getting things ready for .mobi or .epub.

Jan

As far as I’m concerned, the best reason is you end up with click-able hyperlinks. Then you can put it on the web (or into an interactive PDF, prepare it for Kindle-type devices, etc.) and everyone can instantly jump from the index to the relevant place in the text.

In the not-too-distant future — maybe it’s here already — we’ll be able to order printed books to measure. People like me will be able to order books with huge writing so I won’t need to wear glasses to read them. The pagination will be different for each client — and the indexes will sort themselves out automatically, as long as they’re embedded.

InDesign doesn’t do all that bad a job, given that it gives you an embedded index.

When you reuse material that has been indexed, you have to check paragraphs to see if the indexing still works for the paragraph. Opening each little marker up, or checking the palette for each one, is slow. Reading them in context, like the Note feature, would be ideal. Editing them in context would be even more ideal.

I do a lot of work in Frame, and with the IxGen utility, I can quickly check paragraphs for updates. We need something similar for InDesign.

Indexing in ID is also feature poor. It lacks a way to apply character styles or formats to parts of an index entry. That’s particularly important when you have book and newspaper titles that need to be italicized.

There is a work-around. Surround the text to be italicized with a marker. (I use « and ».) Then use a GREP script on the generated index to strip off the marks and apply an italic style. It isn’t perfect and it means that you have to create a separate sort term for those entires. But it beats doing it by hand over and over again.

Keep in mind a principle that Amity Shlaes applies to economics in The Forgotten Man. The basic idea is that “solutions” to problems or, in this case, enhancements to software, are often driven by factors that leave someone out, a forgotten man, who may hold the key to solving that problem.

In the case of Shales’ topic, the New Deal, the forgotten men were those who had the talent to create the new ideas that generated new industries and new jobs. For the New Deal, such people were either forgotten, except as a source of tax revenue, or berated as the ‘malefactors of great wealth.’ The result, some economists say, was a Depression that lasted twice as long as it should.

In the case of InDesign, one of those forgotten people is the solitary indexer. She and others like her don’t buy nearly as many copies of ID as corporate decision makers, and they don’t influence others to buy like those in the technical media. Yet it’s they who know better than anyone what a product needs in the way of enhancements.

I saw two illustrations of that recently. One of Adobe’s ID programmers admitted to me that a reverse search function in ID would be useful and wouldn’t be that hard to do. Why it wasn’t already there, he didn’t know. I could have said that it was an illustration of the “forgotten man”–poor klutzes like me who have to fix typos in books found by others. Since fixing creates less pagination problems if done back-to-front, we need reverse search.

Yesterday, I got a called from someone in Florida. He’d seen a posting I’d made blasting text-to-speech in OS X. The accessibility feature, VoiceOver, is far too complex for most people with vision problems to master, I had written, and the Cocoa Text feature for text-to-speech is far too anemic and clumsy. If a former tech writer with normal vision like me, I pointed out, can’t makes sense of VoiceOver documentation, what about those who have to blow that documentation up to 64-point type to read it and who have multiple other issues in their lives? Most will simply give up.

My Florida caller felt much the same. He knows a lot of older, retired people in Florida who need the sort of assistance text-to-speech provides but can’t begin to master the intricacies of VoiceOver. They’re forgotten people. I encouraged him to contact the accessibility group at Apple, which seems quite open to suggestions, and make their case for enhancing standard text-to-speech to make it both convenient and powerful.

Forgotten people need to find ways to get heard. If you think ID need something fixed or improved, don’t suffer in silence. Make your voice heard. Keep it up until Adobe listens.