Index best practices?

[dmoles]

How are folks generating indexes (in the print sense, not the index.md / index.html sense)?

Is there anything more clever available than just hand-writing a Markdown file full of links?

[geealbers]

Good question. I'd be curious to hear what others have to say.

I can say that here at Getty, we've only ever added indexes to one or two of our Quire books, and we did it the manual way for sure. Just a markdown file (created by a professional indexer) with a list of links. Here's an example: https://www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics/bookindex/. And in the print/pdf version of the book it includes page numbers as well.

I don't think there's any way to automate this in Quire for the PDF output and get page numbers. For the online edition, where you don't need/have page numbers, were we to index a book today I'd look into whether we could create a custom shortcode that we could tag terms with throughout the book and then generate the linked list automatically. Or, perhaps customize the search interface to add a dropdown list of all the index terms that users could then select and see search results for. The latter would work better after we make the improvements to Quire's search that we have slated for later this year. Both would require some significant coding work.

[dmoles]

My current hack, since (because reasons) I'm already preprocessing the Markdown before it goes to Quire, is to parse some custom tags and use those to generate the list. It's not sophisticated enough to handle see and see also, though, and the links aren't as nice as in the professional version.