As a terrific fan of Scrivener, I am often frustrated by the lack of a comprehensive subject index in the pdf help file. Searching (with “find”) almost never leads me to the info I want, so I end up reading whole chapters again and again in a quest to find simple info that an index could easily lead me to straight away.
Please. I’m begging here. I often recommend Scrivener to other writers, but the single biggest difficulty they have is learning the program the natural, intuitive way: by looking up info in an INDEX:
“Something that serves to guide, point out, or otherwise facilitate reference.”
Thanks, it’s something I have on the tentative to-do list for the next major revision. It’s never been high on my radar because frankly I can’t remember the last time I used an index in a digital document. Paper technical manual, absolutely, that’s the only “search engine” available in a stack of paper, but it seems superfluous when PDF readers are so powerful. But that’s just me, I am aware of that.
Meanwhile, there is probably something better than “Find”, assuming you mean the linear one-at-a-time deal. Does your PDF reader have a better search engine perhaps? In mine when I search, I get a concise list of hits with contextual text included, search terms in bold, in a left sidebar, much like a search result on the Web—except that when I hover over a search result I can see a little “preview” of that section of the page itself. I can also sort by hits per page, so it is very easy to see where to go 90% of the time.
Yes, I’ve heard these arguments many times. But there simply is no substitute for a professional index (i.e., created by a professional indexer specializing in technical, computer-related material) that eliminates the entire days spent tracking down the other 10%. In a couple moments, one can have a complete overview of a subject and hone in on the answer, just by perusing a few words. In my opinion, a wonderful program like Scrivener deserves nothing less.
I’ve found that the Table of Contents for the manual is excellent. Not as comprehensive as an index, it’s true, but it gets me what I’m looking for very quickly and efficiently.
Does that profession still exist? Many books nowadays have the most appalling indexes in them no matter how prestigious the publisher. It does not matter what domain the books cover indexes are woefully poor. I complained to one such publisher about their indexing of a large reference book; page numbers were incorrect, terms missing. They eventually sent me a PDF of the index of the revised reprint.
But do we really need indexes for electronic copy? The Scrivener manual can be searched for what ever we are looking for.
Do we really need indexers anyway. The late W Richard Stevens (author of various excellent volumes on UNIX) described his approach to indexing on his website http://www.kohala.com/start/indexing.html. (Friends and family maintain the material as a memorial.) And LaTeX users have excellent resources for makeindex-ing.
It depends on the publisher. My association with O’Reilly & Associates was fairly good, as are most of their books. Sybex, not so much. When I was freelancing for an RPG publisher, I got introduced first-hand to just how difficult it actually is to create a good index. This company produced dozens of RPG supplements a year and had just one person whose full-time job it was to create indexes.
In my opinion, better no index than a bad one – and a good index requires an investment in the right expertise. To the original poster – I would investigate a better PDF reader, as has already been suggested.
Yes, indexers have a professional organization, and they are highly prized in Silicon Valley and across the scientific community. One look at a subject in a good index can tell one not only what the scope of the item entails and lead to precise info, but what aspects it does not cover! If you’ve ever tried to repair a mainframe from a manual with only a Table of Contents, you know what I’m talking about.
A typical technical index takes a pro several days and costs around a thousand dollars or so.
However, if the value of a high-quality index does not seem like something we’d like to see added to this wonderful program’s manual, I’ll let it go now. In my opinion, it’s a shame though. It’s like dressing for a formal affair and leaving one’s shoes behind.
Take a look at the PDF Index Generator program. I use it to help me create my book indexes. At least i will not get wrong pages numbers and won’t pay hundreds of dollars for every book to have an index for it. I prefer to do it myself.