As indexers, we spend a lot of time reading. Good reading skills are essential. As I indexed more books, I found that my reading strategy changed. I remember plowing into that first book without any thought about how I could read it most efficiently to write the index. I just went right for the nitty-gritty […]
Shall I Index This Book?
Freelancing can be a tough gig. We are almost constantly concerned about getting and keeping clients and work. Even if we are up to our eyebrows in work, we hesitate to turn away work. Sometimes we submit a bid or accept anything that’s offered. No matter how desperate we are for work, acceptance should […]
PDF to Word Conversion
I’m a skeptic, and possibly addicted to hard data, i.e. to numbers, when it comes to evaluating advertising claims, etc. I’ve heard that Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is accurate in preserving pagination and format when converting to .docx, but I am instinctively skeptical. Because I want to be able to get PDFs into Index Manager […]
Using Adobe Search
No matter how much we enjoy our work, writing an index can at times be tedious, and even frustrating. We all know the disadvantages of full-text search; however, there are some things that can be made much easier with computer assistance. Search capabilities can be useful even though they can’t produce a quality index by […]
Index Layout: Run-in vs. Indented
When I’ve taught indexing, it’s always been fun to see students go through the first lesson, which has nothing to do with building their own indexes. I start by asking them to go find two books with indexes and describe what those indexes are like: what aspects are useful, what aspects seem to be less […]
Mapping the Page in Book Indexing
I’ve noticed that beginning indexers working with traditional print books can struggle with the challenge of realizing that the most specific target they can give a user is the page number. Over-Indexing For some detail-oriented people who want (sometimes desperately!) to get the index user/reader right to the term they’ve selected, slipping into over-indexing is […]
