[Vimoutliner] Thanks for checkboxes

[Steve Litt]

On Wednesday 07 March 2007 05:39, Lucas Gonzalez Santa Cruz wrote:
> >The checkboxes preserve my progress on indexing my book.
> >I'd never again try to index a book without VO.
>
> I've never authored a book - well, sort-of yes, but not with such an index.
>  So I don't know what's so difficult about it or how you're using it.
>
> I'm not asking for an explanation here as I won't be an author anytime
> soon!
>
> But I can imagine Steve writing a how-to for troubleshooters.com  My
> imagination is wild and badly mannered - sorry about that!  :-)
>
> Lucas

Hi Lucas,

An author's most distasteful work is creating an index. The two times I've 
done it (Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist and my 
upcoming book), it's felt like working in the sludge caldern of a sewage 
treatment plant. When you're done, you just want to take a shower.

It's one or several days of busy work, but you still need to think about which 
things to include and which not to, what to call them in the index, what to 
combine and what to separate, what to hierarchize under what else.

From what my buddies on the LyX list say, here's how an index *should* be 
made:

1) A non-author reads the book carefully, with no thought of an index.
2) The non-author reads it a second time, constructing the index.

Well, I'm not going to pay someone a week's pay to write my index, so here's 
how I'm doing it:

1) I write, thoroughly proofedit, and spellcheck the book.
2) list all words ordered by frequency and alpha ***
3) Let the words remind me of relevent phrases
4) Insert the phrases in an outline
5) Rearrange the outline to make a good index
6) Put checkboxes in the outline
7) For each outline element, look up by keyword in the source document, and if 
appropriate put an index tag, either single or with a start and end range. 
Then check it off the outline.
8) Check often so you can identify mistakes.
9) When 100% of your outline is done, you're done.

***
cat mybook.txt | fmt -1 |  sed -e "s/^[[:space:][:punct:]]*//" | 
sed -e "s/[[:space:][:punct:]]*$//" | tr [:upper:] [:lower:] |  sort | 
uniq -c | sort -rn

I'm done with my index. I've taken a long shower with a lot of soap. I'm proud 
of the result, which is attached.

Thanks


SteveT

Steve Litt
Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware
http://www.troubleshooters.com/
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