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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 1996687" data-attributes="member: 7464">It takes a lot of time to make a good index. You can make a computer list every page every single word appears on, but that kind of index is useless. An actual person has to go through each word of each page and make a decision whether the index should refer to that word. And then you have to wonder - when somebody wants to know about how much light lamps shed, are they going to look under lamps, vision, lighting, shadowy illumination, or what? The index has to not only be complete and concise, but useful. It's considerably harder to make a good index than it looks. I've done it. Computers have made it SO much easier, but it's still a menial and time-consuming task. You have to be 100% certain that there will be no editing and changes after you make the index, or things get really weird. My company (a tech writing firm) has had instances where a customer requested an index for a document and this literally doubled production time and labor cost. Granted, one can make a BAD index in a much shorter time, but often those aren't worth the paper they're printed on, and you'd better off just reading the table of contents and manually flipping through the chapters that seem most relivent to your query.</blockquote>