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Indexes

In its simplest form an index is built up by selecting words or phases from a document, and using the Add To Index... dialogue from the Misc menu to add entries to the index. This can be done after the document has been completed, or while the document is being written.

Once the entries have been added, the index can be saved as a text file which can be inserted into the originating document or formatted as a separate document.

A second dialogue, Update Index... similar to the Add To Index ... dialogue, allows existing entries in the index to be selected, then edited or deleted.

Cross-referencing is not supported, so if a document is updated and the number of pages changed, the page numbers in the index could be invalidated. However it is simple matter to re-generate the index to replace the out-of-date one.

How Indexing works

When a word, or group of words, is selected and added to the index, a hidden marker is inserted into the text at the start of the selection, which references a subject key and an optional qualifier (or second level index).

The subject key is often the same as the selected text, but can be different (it can be any text up to 59 characters long). The qualifier can be up to 119 characters long.

If the text containing the index marker is Dragged & Dropped or Cut & Copied elsewhere, the index information will be copied too, even to other documents. Saving as text will not include the markers and if text is deleted and retyped, the index entries from the deleted text will be lost.

There is a second type of entry which appears in the generated index as 'XX see YY', where XX has the same format of subject key and optional qualifier as above, and YY is any existing entry in the index. Such entries do not have an marker in the text (even though some text may have been selected when the entry was created), and so are not lost when text is deleted.

They can, however, be deleted using the Update Index... dialogue and will also be removed if the thing they reference (YY) is removed.


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