Re: indexes & such

[Sue Heim <SUE -at- RIS -dot- RISINC -dot- COM>]

Bonni Graham provided great examples, and concluded with:

> You get the idea. Creating an index is NOT easy.  You have to think not
> only like a user, but like a confused, possibly even aggravated, user.
> It's not impossible to, but you do have to work a little at it.

Bonni is absolutely right! I've found that if I manage to think of
every possible eventuality, every little thing that a user may be
trying to look up, then I've come up with a good index. I think it is
much better to have a humongous index with tons of entries (using
Bonni's examples), than a slim one that doesn't cover all
possibilities.

No matter what anyone says, I still hate to index. I, unfortunately,
am the only writer here -- la person who gets to do la everything.
Thus, no one to index for me but me! <pout> I use Wextech's
Doc-To-Help to create my manuals and online help, and their indexing
feature seems to work pretty well for me. I circumvent their system
however, by manually adding the index targets/tags. Oh, and I've
found that, in order for their product to actually create the index,
you've gotta have a fast Pentium (the 486 I used to have was such a
slug it took forever!!).

...sue
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Sue Heim
Research Information Systems
Email: Sue -at- ris -dot- risinc -dot- com