Book Indexes: Part 8 — More Lessons Learned in Using DEXembed for the First Time

By Ælfwine Mischler

In Part 7 of this series on book indexes, I wrote about some of the things I learned about embedded indexing when I used DEXembed, an add-in for Word available from Editorium.com, for the first time. In this post, I continue with lessons learned.

You Did What?

I was using paragraph numbers for locators. (DEXembed can also use word number or top of the page, but these are generally less satisfactory.) Before I started indexing, I told the author repeatedly that the paragraphing had to remain stable and he could not add new text, so I was none too pleased when he sent a new paragraph to be added in the middle after I was already three-quarters through the book. I asked DEXembed developer Jack Lyon whether I could just remove the paragraph numbers, add the new text, renumber the paragraph numbers, and move on, and what would happen to the bookmarks I had made.

He did not know the answers but suggested I do a test run on a copy of the file. I removed the paragraph numbers, added the new text, and told DEXembed to number the paragraphs again. It ground away for a minute or two and then told me they were numbered, but I saw no red numbers to the left of the paragraphs — until I scrolled down and saw that the numbering started with 1 a few paragraphs after the new text.

I removed the numbers, saved the file as another name, and tried again to number the paragraphs. This time it worked. Then I had to go into my Sky indexing file to correct the locator numbers after the inserted text.

We Do Not All Count Alike

DEXembed allows you to go to a particular paragraph using Ctrl + Alt + P. However, whenever I entered a paragraph number, DEXembed would select a paragraph before the one I wanted: If I entered Ctrl + Alt + 100, it would take me to 99.

To create a range, I put the cursor in the first paragraph of the topic, clicked Ctrl + Alt + M (to mark the beginning of the topic), put the cursor in the last paragraph, and clicked Ctrl + Alt + L (to get the locator). DEXembed created a bookmark and, because I had opted so, put a comment with the beginning and end paragraph numbers — but they were always off. If I selected paragraphs 225–245, the comment would say 226–246. I was not certain which range I should put in the indexing software — the one I had selected or the one in the comment. I used the actual selected range, which later proved to be the correct decision. What was causing this discrepancy, and would it cause a problem later on?

Yes, it did cause a problem when I embedded the entries. The XE field codes went into the chapter section headings instead of into the paragraphs where they belonged. Back to the developer. He thought a paragraph had been deleted and told me how to find the problem. If Ctrl + Alt + P takes you to the paragraph numbered 10 when you specify 10, but it takes you to the paragraph numbered 499 when you specify 500, you know the problem is between paragraphs 10 and 500. Keep selecting paragraphs every 100 or so (Ctrl + Alt + 100, Ctrl + Alt + 200, etc.) until you find the source of the problem.

In fact, I learned that an extra Enter, not a deleted one, was causing the faulty numbering, which began at the start of the indexable material, after the preface. Following the preface was an Enter and a Page Break. When I deleted the extra Enter, the DEXembed took me to the correct paragraphs.

To be safe, I checked every 50 paragraphs throughout the text and found another place where I had accidentally added an Enter in the middle of a word. Once that was deleted, the numbering problem was solved and the XE field codes went into the correct places.

Work, Work, Work

Embedded indexes are a lot more work for the indexer, who will typically charge more for this version than for a back-of-the-book index. The most trying time is when the actual embedding takes place. At this point, everything is up to Word and there is nothing the indexer can do but hope the embedding works. I kept getting error messages half-way through the embedding, until the developer told me to reboot. I found it also useful to close every other application and the browser while embedding.

If I found an error in the generated index, I had to correct it in Sky, generate the index from Sky as a text file, embed it in another copy of the book (perhaps rebooting first, and praying all the while), generate the index in Word, copy that to another Word file, and make any manual corrections required by Word. (See my December 2017 post.)

Because I was new to using DEXembed, I had to repeat this process several times. Fortunately, I do learn from my mistakes, so the next such project should be easier.

Generally, DEXembed was easy to use, and the developer was helpful in answering my questions. I liked using paragraph numbers for locators and limiting the use of ranges. However, because of Word’s limitations, DEXembed requires an extra step to index footnotes or endnotes, which I did not need to do for this project and did not test. Editorium’s NoteStripper will strip the notes out as regular text. You then number the paragraphs and write the index. After embedding the entries, you use NoteStripper to turn the notes back into regular Word notes. (Note that this is not the same version of NoteStripper that came with Editor’s ToolKit Plus.) One more thing for me to test drive!

Ælfwine Mischler is an American copyeditor and indexer in Cairo, Egypt, who has been the head copyeditor at a large Islamic website and a senior editor for an EFL textbook publisher. She often edits and indexes books on Islamic studies, Middle East studies, and Egyptology.