Just looked at Mellel. There’s no automatic indexing feature. Entries have to be marked.
Word cloud generation, on other hand, is more or less automatic.
Nisus Writer Pro has a promising menu entry, “Index Using Word List” but this isn’t automatic either. The option is greyed out. Select text in document–the option is still greyed out. Creation of a bespoke word list is just as difficult as marking entries, maybe even more so.
If you read the NWP manual, you will see that you can use all the power of the NWP search engine to do the marking for you, including complicated indexing. Making a good index is highly complex, as has been said, and NWP provides good tools … but I don’t believe it’s ever going to be automatic using a word processor … it’ll always demand time and effort, hence the professional indexers.
Mark
Are there still no plans to fix this bug?
It’s not a bug, it’s a deliberately missing feature.
Scrivener is not intended to be a full-end heavy-duty layout tool The capabilities it has to generate epub and mobi files are there as a convenience for the simple cases, not as a one-stop layout shop.
Since indexing is so very clearly tied to the final layout of the document – in every technical book I’ve had published, indexing was literally the very last step we did, after all the other edits and passes made sure everything was locked down – it makes no sense to include it as a feature in Scrivener when Scrivener doesn’t generate the final layout itself and isn’t intended to.
Scrivener already supports indexing for its technical formats:
- General Non-Fiction (LaTeX): read the documentation in the starter file for how to use the built-in styles in that template.
- MultiMarkdown → LaTeX: all of the built-in compile formats designed for this workflow have “Index Key” and “Index Term” styles set up within them.
- MultiMarkdown → OpenOffice (ODT): the starter format for this has had these styles set up for it. They will insert the necessary codes to create an index.
- Pandoc → MS Word (DOCX): likewise, but for those that need Word in their workflow.
- (I should probably add a format for DocBook, come to think of it. It looks very straightforward.)
All of these options are designed to work consistently, with the same styles, so that one can swap workflows without having to adjust the source material. They are documented in Appendix D.5.7. The user manual’s Extras Pack also contains a sample stylesheet you can import into your projects, to add these styles.
So there you go—several different formats support indexing, and with a copy of LaTeX installed, you can go straight to PDF from Scrivener as well (though typically it will be better to typeset in a dedicated tool). Most importantly, the two major word processing formats are supported, meaning the index can be carried into final production phases with most tools.
Of course if you aren’t familiar with using Scrivener’s technical capabilities, you may not need to learn too much about it, unless you want to (though there are distinct advantages in doing so—like being able to “create your own features” as these very workflows demonstrate). All of these mechanisms are available via conversion, for those who draft text using rich text word processing tools. You can read about these options in §23.4.3, General Options, under the subheading of Markup Options, pg. 586.
I would think searching, and having a strong metadata backbone in your project, is going to be the most effective tool for making this job easier. You can benefit from having an “production index” you might say, before you can construct a reader’s index. Scrivener is uniquely well suited toward both tasks in my opinion, and it’s the kind of thing you can build up as you write, being generally useful at all phases of the project.
A word cloud sounds like a noisy mess to me, but honestly it’s just a visualisation method anyway. If you want a frequency word dump, then use the Statistics tool in Scrivener to get one, copy and paste into a spreadsheet or word cloud generator, and there you go. Have fun weeding out the chaff.
Okay I think I found a way. It’s still cumbersome. But I hate leaving the software for a third party software when I find a great deal of joy with this one. My Strategy for Index is to simply use footnotes. Considering I rarely use foot notes anyways. Just hear me out I’m not done. Footnotes and Annotations are turned off by default for Compile to Kindle or .epub. While foot notes don’t show the actual page number it does show the chapters at the end if you add this to the index file <$–ENDNOTES–>. When I make a foot note I highlight the word I want to have in the Index and paste into the inspector under footnotes/comments and then I add a comma to the end of it. The last step is compile to PDF using maybe Paperback (6x9) or (5.06x7.81) which ever you prefer. Uncheck Remove footnotes, then check Export inspector footnotes as endnotes. Now you have all the keywords listed in the Index file grouped by chapters. Paste that into the Real index or New index file. then go chapter by chapter to get the exact page. It should be easy to find because each foot note is numbered and you are searching for them chapter by chapter. Copy and paste from the PDF back into scrivener new index file Remove the chapter headings. Then go back and Check the box to Remove Footnotes at compile time. You are back to normal. If you insist on actually using real foot notes. No problem. Leave them there. Create snapshots of the pages that use keywords and the pages that are unchanged. Just label the snapshots “keywords” or “index” that way you can revert back. Or simply delete the keyword foot notes that are not needed anymore. It super easy to delete footnotes from the inspector. One click. Took me a few hours for a 400 page book plus I did edits at the same time and caught errors that scrivener doesn’t catch. The last thing to do is reorganize the index into alphabetical order. Yes some of this is tedious but at least you are not starting from scratch. And the book still looks professional for a print press. I hope this helps.
Following along with what AmberV discussed a year ago (excerpts below), for the past year+ I’ve been pleasantly working with Scrivener+LaTeX on a reference document for the post-pandemic-climate era.
The reference document is heavily indexed and so I developed an expanded toolset to automate and augment the default Scrivener Styles indexing toolset available in the General Non-Fiction (LaTeX) template.
I consider myself a novice at both Scrivener and especially LaTeX, so I have NO idea how many Scrivener users also use LaTeX, and know even less of those who may be interested in spending time to complement their existing Scrivener Styles indexing toolset.
For the subset of Scrivener+LaTeX users that may benefit with an expanded indexing toolset, I’ve attached a few screen shots:
- a sample of my Scrivener+LaTeX code (on the left) along with the default+augmented Scrivener Indexing Styles available in my Scrivener project (on the right),
- the corresponding section of my compiled+typeset PDF showing a sample of a few texts that are highlighted using the augmented Styles that are listed in the 1st screen shot, and
- sections of the compiled+typeset PDF document Index with excerpts for a few of the Style’d entries as they appear in the Index.
If others have developed alternative Styles tools that are already available to those in the Scrivener+LaTeX community, I’d appreciate learning more about them, and I’ll save myself the time of documenting what I’ve done.
If anyone IS interested in learning more about the Styles I’ve developed, please drop a note here to let me know, and as time permits, I’ll set aside time to document how to implement the augmented Styles.
Please note that any and all of the colors for the Style’d texts can be changed to whatever the user wants, including simple B&W.
Thanks for reading,
scrive
P.S. Apologies for how large the attachments appear.
[attachment=2]Scrivener Styles Panel2.gif[/attachment]
[attachment=1]Scrivener Text Styles PDF2.gif[/attachment]
[attachment=0]Augmented Scrivener Index2.gif[/attachment]