[Tutor] Advice required: Documentation Writing / Sofware Test ing

[alan.gauld@bt.com]

> I find it curious how badly indexed most technical books are.
> indexing ought properly to be an automated procedure

In my experience (albeit limited) it's usually manual.

> information i needed.  sometimes, it almost seems like the indexing
> procedure consists of somebody reading through the text and
> arbitrarily deciding which terms on a page or in a section to index.

As I mentioned earlier the de-facto standard tool in publishing books 
is Adobe FrameMaker. Frame has powerful indexing tools but they work 
by going through the text and identifying the terms to be indexed and 
linking them to an index entry. This is good if you want to link GUI, 
UI and Tkinter all to a single reference, not so good if you want to 
index ALL occurences of GUI...

Also indexing is often not carried out by the author but by a 
third party. Frame's tools are powerful but not always so easy 
to use!

Alan G