[OS X TeX] Indexes

Alain Schremmer Schremmer.Alain at gmail.com
Sat Dec 17 01:41:33 CET 2005


Simon Spiegel wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
> coming near the end of my thesis, I started thinking about creating  
> an index. Now there's of course makeindex et al. but I find the idea  
> of going through 300 pages and add \index everywhere not very  
> attractive. Not only will this take a lot of time, but the tex file  
> will be quite unreadable in the end. 

Just in case, here is what I am doing. I have a macro:

    \textbf{#SEL#}\index{#SEL#}

So, when I introduce "new term", I select it and just hit the macro and 
the source now has \textbf{new term}\index{new term} instead of just 
"new term". Rather painless.
In your case, what I would do is to read my thesis and each time I 
encounter a new term …
Of course, you will want to be sure that this is the first occurence of 
the term. So, I would print the index and reread the thesis.
OK, so that is tenth-automate but the best I can think of. Unless you 
could write a macro that would search each term in the index and check 
if it is its first occurence.

By the way, the reason for the \textbf{#SEL#} part is that it makes it 
easier to see if the term has been indexed. Also, if you want to index 
"new term" while it appears differently in the source, say as a plural 
as in "I want to index new terms", what you do is to macro "new term" 
and then select the final s and bloldface it.

You might want also to use \usepackage{showidx} which will show the 
indexed term in the margin. Later, you need just comment it out.

Hope it does help.
Regards
--schremmer

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