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I bought Nisus Writer Pro for creating an index for a book and am pleased it seems to have the secret... but it won’t let it out.

It offers a number of options, and surely a basic variation would be where it ‘...creates a new document with an alphabetical list of all the “words” in that selection’ (p223 in the manual) and from that, allows you, after removing unwanted words, to eventually produce the index.

But there seems to be no suggested way of taking the single column “word list” created using the Create Word List (v3) macro, and converting it to the double column “word list file” unless you go through the simple list typing a tab and the name of each word. Is there a “missing macro”? Also it really isn’t clear whether unwanted entries are simply deleted, or need the more specialist “de-indexing” by highlighting a term in the text (or list?) and going via “insert > indexing...”

Much effort has been put into the manual but it could do with improvement. I’d be happy to do over a section or two for free but I’d need to know what it’s supposed to be saying first! Can anyone divulge the full spell for creating a simple index? I can’t waste any more time trying to guess it.

To create a concordance file from a word list, you could save this expression as a Nisus Writer Macro (with extension nwm):

Replace All '^.+$', '\0\t\0', 'E'

Open the word list file and run the macro. This will create a concordance file.
You can modify words and expressions in the second column as you wish.

The first column represents words and expressions that you want to find and the second column represents how you want what is found to appear in the index.

To index a complete document using this list, open the document and select all. Then use the Index Using Word List.. command and in the panel which opens, select your concordance file and press the Auto Index button.

Thanks a lot, Hamid! I'll give it a go!

Cordially...