Indexing advice?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Jennifer Rondeau reports: <<I am struggling to deal with an indexing project
for which I do not have adequate resources to complete properly...
completion of an index for a RoboHelp project that amounts to 1000+ dense
and complex topics for an MRP (Material Requirements Planning) app. There is
a somewhat haphazard index already in place.  The original project plan
allotted 3 days for this project.>>

Yikes! 333 _complex_ topics per day? That's something like 40 per hour. Not
even remotely possible. That being the case:

<<I now find myself having to figure out how to create some kind of
deliverable within the next week and a half, which is insufficient time for
a complete index given the other constraints of my job description.>>

At this point, think triage: you won't be able to do an index that you'd be
proud of, so concentrate on doing one that will be as useful as possible to
the user. A few things to keep in mind:

- Don't manually repeat words in the topic title: You should be able to
persuade RoboHelp to automatically include these terms in the index, and
that's a good start to an index. In version 9, and probably earlier
versions, simply click on the Topic title with the righthand mouse button
and select the Index tab. There should be a button along the lines of
"SmartIndex". Click that and select the "look for keywords in Topic titles"
option. This will give you the skeleton of an index. (Not sure whether this
works for the whole document or just the selected topic. Either way, it's
fast and more effective than doing all the hard work yourself.)

- Given that users can always use the table of contents and search function
to find words in the titles, concentrate solely on creating _synonyms_
(words that can't be found using the search function). That dramatically
cuts the amount of manual labor you'll have to do.

- Forget about consistency and following indexing best practices. So long as
users can find what they're looking for, they won't worry about whether you
used the participle form of a word for some concepts (e.g., "indexing") and
the noun form for other concepts (e.g., "print"). That's sloppy indexing
style, but from the user perspective, it's much less annoying than not being
able to find either the indexing or print functions. As Andrew Plato would
say, forget about fondling the fonts: make the index functional first, then
pretty it up later if you have time.

<<I have not done indexes for online apps before, although I have extensive
indexing experience for print.>>

There isn't all that much difference. If you can index well in print, you
can do it well online. And in future projects, borrow a trick from what many
writers do when indexing printed manuals: create the indexes as you go
rather than waiting until the end of the project. You'll still have to edit
the index, particularly if the interface is in flux, but you can do that
simultaneously with edits to the topic text: if the "name" field becomes the
"nomenclature" field, update the index entries when you update the help
topic's text.

<<I clearly have to pare back my original plans to index fully (at least for
the initial release of the app, which is still undergoing final interface
tweaks that will affect the index).>>

The nice thing about online help is that it costs nothing to update. Well,
nothing except your time. <g> Come up with a good first attempt that you can
build on, and negotiate time with your managers to improve it for the first
"bug fix" or "service pack" release of your software.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

"Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the
earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do
so. The first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly
paid."--Bertrand Russell

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