[Vimoutliner] Thanks for checkboxes

[Stefan Schmiedl]

Steve Litt (07.03. 08:54):

> 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.

Creating an index is fun! All you need is an author with a really bad
memory (like yours truly).

You recall vaguely what you've been writing about. How many different
words or perspectives can you think of that people might use to find
the information in the book?

> 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.

The author(s) write the book with a layout permitting marginal comments.
When an author feels the urge to comment, it's a good target for index
entries.

Especially when dealing with the LaTeX way of buildings indices, index
creation can be done very efficiently during the writing / proofing
stages. You'll probably get too many items, different spellings,
singular and plural mixed, but deleting/changing spurious entries is
easy with a good text editor.

You can also use different macros to distinguish the different things
you can put in an index: concepts, examples, jokes, quotes, keywords

The fun begins when you change the macro definition to leave colored
spots on the pages. Too much blue and no red might indicate an excessive
Gags_per_Information ratio. Too many green keywords are usually boring
for the reader (reference material), so you might want to change the
structure of the book. A page without colored dots? Remove it, nothing
notable to see there...

s.

-- 
Stefan Schmiedl
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