Why no index is new WotC books? *Update: Received "official" answer... kinda...*

[cybertalus]

And it's not as if WotC has never done a good index. The FRCS has a great index.

 

[Committed Hero]

Lack of an index is probably more likely than not in a given book. Only Steve Jackson can be counted on to include them.

 

[reveal]

And it's not as if WotC has never done a good index. The FRCS has a great index.

The Eberron book has a really good one as well. But not the Sharn book.

I guess I can see not including one for the Complete books if for no other reason as a lot of the info can be easily found by looking in the ToC (for example the Complete Adventurer lists EVERY prestige class in the ToC). But for a book like Sharn: City of Towers, an index is crucial. It's a location book and has TONS of NPCs, areas, etc.

 

[seankreynolds]

It seems the designers do not have the habits of using the indexing tool provided with whatever program they use to redact their books. It's not hard, but it requires you to mark some words as index entries.

And it's instantly wrong if something gets moved when the book is typeset, which isn't in the same program used to type or edit it.

In any case, in my time at WotC it has never been the designer's job to do the index; material gets moved and the designer's index is invalid. It's done in typesetting, and thus it's not the designer's decision to include one or not (barring the designer saying, "I'm going to leave one page in the outline for the index").

 

[Gez]

And it's instantly wrong if something gets moved when the book is typeset, which isn't in the same program used to type or edit it.

And they are incompatible? Hey, I finally found what program I should write, an index-importation tool for typesetting programs. I'll be rich at least!

 

[shady]

MS Word (or any other word processor I can think of) isn't capable of managing a document as large as a regular WotC book, or of laying it out properly. Until relatively recently my company used Framemaker but (being a technical company, and also having these decisions in the hands of technical people) the authors now use an XML editing tool with XSLT conversion stylesheets. I think Framemaker has indexing as an add-on.

Certainly if you start off with XML then writing some auto-indexing software is not at all complex - I think that is how many of the O'Reilly technical books are/were managed (many of the earlier ones were written in or converted to nroff).

I'd add that most of the Wizards books probably have a fixed page length, so by putting in an index you are going to sacrifice some content and/or art (some of the latter might not be a loss).

 

[PatrickLawinger]

This is basically true for gaming books as well. The index (if there is one) is made last (after the initial layout) and it is made "by hand." We put an index in CSIO (City State of the Invincible Overlord) and it took me a very long time to create it. It also has a mistake or two that I missed but that is always going to happen.

A good table of contents can often take the place of an index and it can be tagged in such a way as to "auto-create" (mostly) when it goes into layout. This is much easier than having to go back after editing, design changes, and layout to look-up page numbers.

I like indices too, but having made some I know what a pain in the ass they are and how much time they take.

Patrick

I work in publishing (non-gaming), and can't make excuses for this - I agree, indices are HIGHLY needed for many of these books. That said, here's some stuff from behind the curtain that may shed some illumination.

1) It's actually very expensive to do a "good" index - many companies even outsource this part of the production process. Auto-indexers are great, but if you want a strong, readily usable index, you don't want to see every page where "magic" was referenced, but the pages where it was referenced in regards to a new rule that you're going to want to check on the fly. Human decision making is needed to edit the results from what a program spits out as all of the uses of the word "magic" (for instance).

2) It's not the designer's/author's responsiblity to do an index - editors will change sequencing of pages, perform layout, and do other things that would throw off whatever preliminary index an author might write. Some houses have authors contribute to the process, but when it comes down to it, it's the actual generating of useful page numbers, not keywords, that is the labor intensive part.

3) Most Tables of Contents on WotC products are actually pretty good. That said, an index would be much more helpful. (e.g. Silver Marches - I can never find what I want in there, which is sad - it is SUCH a great book.)

4) The index is often one of the last things to be done. If a product is running late on a production schedule, it's no surprise that it gets scrapped.

I haven't seen Hero Games' more recent titles, but if they're doing it, I agree - it should be done.

 

[Verequus]

I work in publishing (non-gaming), and can't make excuses for this - I agree, indices are HIGHLY needed for many of these books. That said, here's some stuff from behind the curtain that may shed some illumination.

1) It's actually very expensive to do a "good" index - many companies even outsource this part of the production process. Auto-indexers are great, but if you want a strong, readily usable index, you don't want to see every page where "magic" was referenced, but the pages where it was referenced in regards to a new rule that you're going to want to check on the fly. Human decision making is needed to edit the results from what a program spits out as all of the uses of the word "magic" (for instance).

2) It's not the designer's/author's responsiblity to do an index - editors will change sequencing of pages, perform layout, and do other things that would throw off whatever preliminary index an author might write. Some houses have authors contribute to the process, but when it comes down to it, it's the actual generating of useful page numbers, not keywords, that is the labor intensive part.

3) Most Tables of Contents on WotC products are actually pretty good. That said, an index would be much more helpful. (e.g. Silver Marches - I can never find what I want in there, which is sad - it is SUCH a great book.)

4) The index is often one of the last things to be done. If a product is running late on a production schedule, it's no surprise that it gets scrapped.

I haven't seen Hero Games' more recent titles, but if they're doing it, I agree - it should be done.

Reading this, I have to say, that the publishers use simply the wrong programs. With LaTeX one has only to add the command "\index{Entry}" at the deemed important places and then can get near automatically a correct index - the shuffling of text has no influence on the correctness, if the index is updated afterwards.

The one and only problem with LaTeX is, that one has to be very knowledgeable, if one wants to change something which is beyound the standard distribution. It can surely be done and with a good probability it has already been done, but you still need to know, where the extra package with the required functionality is - with several thousands of extensions not a simple task.

Otherwise, with LaTeX you can set books of near unlimited size and with a lot of less bugs than you get in Word - actually, the very core of LaTeX, the TeX-kernel, is considered to be bug-free. I'm testing the capabilities right now with a private relayout of Elements of Magic Revised (with permission), because the official PDF doesn't contain the updated text yet. I have to say, that my version does look better except some missing art - especially the tables are now aesthetic, compared to the original ones. I'll attach a sample - mine may be bigger, but it is more eye-friendly.

 

[Swiftbrook]

I don't think this has been mentioned....A one page index means one less page of content. It has been stated that the WotC books have a good TOC. With a good TOC, I think I'd prefer one more page of content. Of course, both the index and the extra content would be nice .

-Swiftbrook

 

[reveal]

I don't think this has been mentioned....A one page index means one less page of content. It has been stated that the WotC books have a good TOC. With a good TOC, I think I'd prefer one more page of content. Of course, both the index and the extra content would be nice .

-Swiftbrook

I'd prefer a good index to one more page of content. Considering almost a third of Races of Destiny was taken up by the Ilumians, for example, I don't think one page would have killed them.

In other news, I received an e-mail from Keith Baker telling me they just finished the index for Sharn: City of Towers and it's available at www.bossythecow.com.