Confusion with Indexing

[CrystalKirk]

Hello,

I have recently taken over building/maintaining the online resource my company uses. There has been a push to have "more" avaialble via the index, however when I attempt to provide this I run into problems.

For this to make sense a quick back ground.

We have many diffrent topics, and each topic has many diffrent book marks. These book marks are or course relevant and save time. The alternative being a time consuming scrolling through the whole topic.

I understand how to link my index to these spcific bookmarks, however I was hoping for something a little more intuative.

I have also tried using the Index Wizard, but those keywords linked to the topic as a whole and not the individual bookmark.

Recently I have discovered that while in the Index area if you right click on a bookmark you want to add and then select "properties", there is an option to add your own key words.

However again this key words link to the document has a whole and not the bookmark I have clicked on.

Is there a way to have a bookmark connected to more then one keyword, without having to enter it in manually many times?

I hope there is.

Cheers

[MergeThis]

With the Index entry (or subentry) selected in the top panel of the Index Designer, click and drag the bookmark (or topic) into the bottom panel of the Index Designer.


Good luck,
Leon

[Phil_Wells]

Also make sure that all index entries are to the left of the Index Designer - it is only these entries that are searchable.

If you make an index entry a child of another index entry, you can click on it to take you to the topic, but it won't be found in a search.

This precludes grouping index entries together in a parent/child structure. (Grr....)

[MergeThis]

Phil:

Are you talking about RoboHTML? None of your responses match any of my experiences with the product, so I can't even begin to address them. What needs to be "searchable" in an Index, and since when does RH "preclude grouping index entries together in a parent/child structure"?


Good luck,
Leon

[Phil_Wells]

Hi Leon,

It is HTML - I didn't explain myself well.

When you manually create an index you can have parent entries in the index, and associate child index entries with those parents.

Essentially you can create a two level index.

Parent A
...Child 1
...Child2
Parent B
...Child3
...Child4

When you've compiled the file and use the index you'd normally type in a term you want to locate in the index - for example 'Fixture'.

The search in the index will locate 'Fixture' if it is at parent level, but will not locate it if it is a child entry.

You can still associate topics with both parent and child entries, and you will be taken to them when you click on the index entry.

To give you an example, suppose i set up an Index structure like:

Fixture
...Adding
...Editing
...Deleting
Gondola
...Adding
...Editing
...Deleting

I would be able to find Fixture or Gondola by typing in the term at the top of the Index tab in the compiled file. However, typing in Adding would not give a match.

I had hoped to set up a visually neat manual index that would griup terms logically, like an index in a book, but apparently you can't do this in RH.

If you have to do it all on one level 'Adding Fixture' comes at a very different point in the Index to 'Editing Fixture'.

[MergeThis]

Oh, THAT search!

The first rule of indexing is that you never, ever, ever create a single entry/subentry for anything.

That is, in your example, you would need to add:

Adding
...Fixtures
...Gondolas
...etc.

In other words, you have no idea what term a user might have in mind when accessing your index. For example, if you have fixtures with multiple finishes, how do you think a user might search for "adding a chrome fixture"? Showing no other subentries for this example, you'd have to create Index entries for:

Adding
...Chrome Fixtures

Chrome Fixtures
...Adding

Fixtures
...Chrome, Adding

Creating a truly useful Index is much more painful than many folks realize, Phil!


Good luck,
Leon

[Phil_Wells]

Hi Leon,

That's the way RH works at the moment, but it's always struck me as clunky.

If we read a book we go to the index and it says:

Napoleon
...Battle of Jena
...Battle of Austerlitz
...Battle of Waterloo
Nelson
...Battle of the Nile
...Battle of Copenhagen
...Battle of Trafalgar

And we can readily find what we need in the index.

Now if RH searched to all depths in the index, entering either Nelson or Nile would bring up info on the Battle of the Nile, while entering battle would bring up information on all 6 battles.

If books can do it efficiently without adding

Adding
...Chrome Fixtures

Chrome Fixtures
...Adding

Fixtures
...Chrome, Adding

Why can't RH?