Re: TECHWR-L Digest - 26 Jan 1998 to 27 Jan 1998

[Iain Harrison <iharriso -at- SCTCORP -dot- COM>]

Damien Braniff <Damien_Braniff -at- PAC -dot- CO -dot- UK> wrote:
>>
Me again!  All our docs are produced in Word (max doc size<100pages)
and this works quite well - generating indexes is a little painstaking
but fairly effective.  However, the doc(s) for our biggest product is
provided in a binder and comprises several manuals and datasheets
(about 300 pages).
What would be ideal (frequently asked for) would be to have an index
for the binder as a whole - is there an application that can do this
or can word indexes be easily merged?
<<

I'm puzzled by this. I can't really imagine what use there would be
for an index that didn't cover the whole binder. There is an argument
for a ToC for each section (though an overall one is generally nice as
well) but I'd hate to have to look through several index pages to find
all the references to one subject.

The short answer is yes, an index that covers several Word documents
is trivial. In the document that holds the index itself (preferably
only the index in the file, but that's another matter) have a Word RD
field referencing each of the other documents to be indexed.

For an index, it doesn't matter where the fields are, or in what order
they are listed, but if you use the same technique for the ToC (and I
would), make sure that you list the files in the correct order, and
that you place the RD fields in the correct place in the document, so
that the other document headings are listed in the correct place
relative to the headings in the ToC document.

Iain Harrison
iharriso -at- sctcorp -dot- com
iain -at- hairydog -dot- clara -dot- net