Software Reviews

• Book ID: 104624576
• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 130 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0010-4817
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00056149

✦ Synopsis

The accurate and complete indexing of a book can be done with a good word-processing program. Granted, the indexing, if it is to correspond to a printed hard copy, may require the strategic setting of margins and the creative use of such functions as repagination. More importantly, perhaps, the production of the index will require that the book in question is already on disk. If these conditions cannot be met, then INDEXX, indexing software produced by philosophy professor Norman Swartz, will most definitely come in handy.

INDEXX was written in response to Swartz's own need for a good, fast indexing program. Since he couldn't find one on the market, he created one himself. The result of his efforts, INDEXX 6.02, is powerful, straightforward, and very easy to use. And as an added bonus to the novice user, the accompanying manual is actually written in English.

The manual includes a brief tutorial that walks the first-time user quickly through the program's paces. After one time through the tutorial, I tried the program out on one chapter of a printed book, and had little difficulty in coming up with a useful and complete index. I did encounter several small problems or issues not addressed by the tutorial, but most of these were easily dealt with by reference to the rest of the manual.

The basic process of creating an index with this program is very simple. In the default mode, the user can enter either a single word or name, followed by a comma and a page number or span of numbers. The name should be entered with the first-name preceding the last; the program will