CompuServe Messages

The way we do it (in excellence!) is first, we provide two menu options, mark index entry and mark TOC entry. (They have keyboard shortcuts, aslo) Whenever you highlight something and select one of these, it places a TOC or index marker at the start and end of the highlighted text. When you select generate TOC, it searches for a marker, takes the text until the next marker, and adds a character tab with dots (….) and then adds the page number. Character tabs repeat a character until a tab stop, giving you an effect like INTRODUCTION………..1 PREVIEW…………….2 etc. When finished, all this is placed in the paste buffer, and you can paste it into your document. With generate Index, it is pretty much the same, except that it also searches the entire document for other occurences of the text in question, and adds these page numbers also. If page numbers are consecutive, it specifies a range. Then, it alphabetizes all entries and eliminates duplicates, and puts all this in the paste buffer. Neither the TOC or Indexes are automatically updated, you have to regenerate them if you change your document around. There's other stuff that could be done, but this seems to work well. Things it does'nt do are check footnotes for text, or headers/footers, which you wouldn't really want since they are on every page. We even had one person who wanted us to automatically index every word of a document and then have a dictionary of "common words" like the, it, and, for, etc. that we would automatically remove…. sheez.. anyways, when using them, keep in mind that…. you can use phrases for either indexes or TOC, but avoid leading or trailing spaces for index entries or else (well, more than one leading or trailing) you may miss an instance… Also, if you're going to mark a phrase or word as both an index entry and a TOC entry, mark it as an index entry first. That way you get every instance. Since the TOC marker is a character (albeit non-printable), marking it as a TOC entry first would only index other instances where it was also marked as a TOC entry. If in doubt, select show markers, and see where the markers are.