Building an index

[David Sharp]

Hi,
I'm a recent adopter of Nisus Writer, and am caught in the usual dilemma: I need to get on with my big writing project, and therefore don't always have the time to Read the Fabulous Manual or check in to the fabulous forums as much as I should. So forgive me if following questions have already been asked and answered!

I'm working on a longish non-fiction project, with plenty of footnotes and a need for rigorous planning to avoid repetition and redundancy.

It has suddenly occurred to me that it could be a good idea to build the index as I'm writing the book, rather than waiting until it's finished. Not only will that be useful in itself, but it can help me keep tabs on the overall structure during the writing process.
To make my index as rational as possible, I'm systematically using the "Index as" feature, with two levels of hierarchy. In a sense, the index thereby becomes an alternative view of the document.

I have inserted a copy of the index at the end of my document, and each time I add a new item, I do a "rebuild index" command. This of course involves jumping to the bottom of my document each time, and then returning to where I was before.

I'm finding the idea extremely useful; but unless I've missed something in the manual, I can see a few features which would make it even more effective.

The main problem is that when I want to add a new item to the index, the only way I have of ensuring that it "fits" into the existing structure of my index is by going to the end of the document and looking. For example, one of my main index entries is entitled "children"; it has several sub-entries. If at some later date I want to add a new entry on that subject, I have to be careful to type "children" - not "child", "young people" or "kids" - into the "index as" window. If I don't do that, I'll end up with different index entries referring to the same subject. Same thing for the sub-entries.

This problem could be overcome if the current contents of the index were available as a pull-down menu from within the "index as" command. This would need to be available at each level of the index hierarchy. That way I could simply "click" my new index entries into the existing structure if required, and be sure that if I created new entries, they wouldn't be duplicating ones that already exist.

In other words, the "Index as" text zone, and its "sub-entry" zone, would offer the choice of either typing in a new entry name, or selecting one from those that already exist.

(I haven't yet used the "list cross reference" feature in the "index as" menu, but a similar possibility would no doubt be useful there. Particularly as with the existing system, one can inadvertently create a cross-reference to an index entry that doesn't in fact exist.)

Another feature which would considerably improve the index-making process would be the ability to directly reopen the "index as" menu for an existing entry, in order to edit it. Thanks to NWP's highlighting feature, I already have my index entries coloured in my text; if for example I could do a "CTRL-click" on them and bring up their "Index as" menu, that would be really cool. In similar vein, it could be useful if a tooltip label could appear over the text corresponding to an "index as" item, to give the text of the corresponding entry. And while I'm making ever more extravagant suggestions, how about the ability to directly rename an index entry; unless I'm mistaken that isn't currently possible, although I think it is for bookmarks.

In the absence of any of the above possibilities, if I need to restructure my index, or simply to rename an entry, I have to delete the original entry and go through the whole "insert index" process again. This can be quite laborious.

One last suggestion: it would be marvellous if the page numbers in the displayed index could be make clickable, to allow me to jump straight back to the corresponding point in the document. Like many people, I imagine, I have a strong preference for working in draft mode, and as far as I can see, that doesn't give me many options to "snap back" to where I was before whenever I move around in my document, mainly because the page numbers aren't displayed.
I realise that this kind of thing can be done via bookmarks, but I have a preference for keeping the table of contents visible in the sidebar, and I very much appreciate the fact that it is clickable. And unless I'm mistaken, I can't display both the TOC and my bookmarks at the same time. (Building up a structure of bookmarks might be very useful for the writing process, but unlike both the TOC and the index, it will not be part of the final product, so the idea seems to me to be less cost-effective).

Of course, if the "index as" suggestions made above were to be implemented, I would no longer need to be continually zipping down to examine my ongoing index each time I add a new entry. Nevertheless, I think that any ways of improving the "jumping-around" process while in draft mode would be useful. Going back and forth between "page" and "draft" modes just to see where you are in your document can be time-consuming.

Many thanks for any suggestions or comments. Best wishes,

[Hamid]

[...]Another feature which would considerably improve the index-making process would be the ability to directly reopen the "index as" menu for an existing entry, in order to edit it. [...]

You don't have to open the "index as" menu to do that; when you select any text in the file which is marked for "index as", the "index as" text appears in the Tooldrawer in the Reference Tools under "Index As". You can edit the text there, as shown hereunder:

IndexAsTooldrawer.png (13.9 KiB) Viewed 4515 times

[martin]

Thanks for your well laid out thoughts David- you've some good ideas there. Having a popup/auto-complete helping out when marking new index entries seems especially useful. I'll see about filing your ideas as enhancement requests for possibly inclusion in a future version of NWP.

In addition to Hamid's tip, I'd also like to remind you that any palette can be dragged out of the tool drawer to float anywhere on your screen.