Congratulations!
Finally you have finished writing your book. Now your publisher asks who is doing your book index. Of course you can hire an indexer, or you can create the index yourself. Sometimes creating the back of your book index is much easier than you think, and that is what i am going to explain in this article.
Below is a historic book that has many names, and i want to create a names back-of-book index for this book. You can preview or download the PDF book from here to check it:
Believe it or not; i have indexed all names in that book just in 10 minutes. The names in my book are all written in bold font, so with the help of the book indexing tool PDF Index Generator; i have commanded it to index any text in the book that has bold font. In short here are the steps that i have followed:
- I have run the program, and i have selected the book that i want to index.
- I have commanded the program to index all bold entries in my book and ignore any other words found inside it.
- The program has started collecting those terms from my book and their corresponding pages numbers. It took less than one minute to do that.
- The program has then showed me the results and gave me many editing options to edit those results. I have just asked it to merge all duplicates in order to merge names having the same spelling but different case sensitivity, like “Ibrahim ibn Sinan” and “IBRAHIM IBN SINAN”. This took only a couple of seconds.
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Now i am done. I have then asked the program to write the index to a PDF file. You can check the final index from here:
Marvellous! … If you want to index terms in your book that have a specific font format; like bold entries or italic entries, or entries having a specific font name or size, then i advise following the same procedure. And if you want to index all the names in your book but those names do not appear in bold, you can still index them using PDF Index Generator, as it has two other useful features which can help you do that; the “Include queries” feature and the “Include categories” feature. I will try to explain them in later posts 🙂
