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

[Astalanya]

The absence of an index has been incredibly frustrating, especially when you just need to look up one specific entry and can't remember where it is. Would it take much work to jot down NPCs, a few locations, and important details on two pages? Oi.

 

[reveal]

The absence of an index has been incredibly frustrating, especially when you just need to look up one specific entry and can't remember where it is. Would it take much work to jot down NPCs, a few locations, and important details on two pages? Oi.

This is one of the reasons I really like Keith Baker and what he's trying to do with Eberron. He took it upon himself to get WotC's permission and create indeces for locations and NPCs in the Sharn:City of Towers book. WotC needs more people like him.

 

[Gez]

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.

PS: Just FYI, the plural of index is indices. Indexes is also correct. It's the same for several other words ending in -ex, like vertex (vertices or vertexes). But not indeces.

 

[Raloc]

Ah, was what I suspected on the other page then. I can understand why they don't do it though, it would seriously hinder my writing if I had to stop and index-mark a word every time.

 

[reveal]

PS: Just FYI, the plural of index is indices. Indexes is also correct. It's the same for several other words ending in -ex, like vertex (vertices or vertexes). But not indeces.

 

[Kast]

We need indices. Keith Baker thinks they were important enough for Sharn, that he's doing them himself. Likely he even petitioned for an index before it was published and for whatever reason (there are myriad possibilities, money, process, needs disagreement etc etc), it wasn't done.

Fill out those WotC comment cards and send them in, or email customer service with your complaints. Perhaps they just don't understand how useful they are, and how frustrating it is when you can't find what you're looking for.

 

[cybertalus]

Thanks for posting that, Reveal.

So, maybe if a bunch of us complain they'll get the message and give us indexes again. Hopefully good ones too, like in the FRCS, not halfway done ones like in the 3.0 core books.

 

[Alan Shutko]

While indexing a Word document might be relatively easy, many professional desktop publishing suites do not include indexing functionality.

Which don't? IIRC, both Quark and InDesign have indexing. As do the packages designed for technical documentation (which would perhaps be a better fit for RPG products, except for putting annoying backdrops under the text).

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Mind you the indexing on the old version of Quark I used for writing the newsletter for our agency was worse than dreadful, though slightly better than the global search and replace. (If you ever wonder why the old White Wolf books had so many 'see page XX' errors it means that you have never tried to do an index in Quark...) Never trust the thing, what you see is not what you will get. I gather that Quark is better now, but we had already switched to InDesign. (Which ironically cost less to buy new than Quark cost for an upgrade...)

The Auld Grump, best thing about InDesign - it isn't Quark Xpress...

 

[MonsterMash]

To be honest the reason that good indices are rare is that they really need to be done by a human being as no software package really does it that well even if the author has marked up the text as they go (ideally with SGML tags), though the software is getting better.