[tei-council] the pdf guidelines, a battle not a war

[David Sewell]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> David Sewell wrote
> > Will there be conceptual terms added to the Index eventually, as there  were
> > for the printed P4
> > Guidelines? Or has this been discussed? (How was it handled for the  printed
> > P4 Guidelines?)
> >
> The P4 index was created automatically from embedded
> <term> elements and so on. It was not very good then,
> and it has got worse since (in that new prose has not
> been consistently seeded with <term>s). It seemed sensible to
> have no conceptual index rather than a bad conceptual
> index.
>
> I don't see any way of improving this without
> paying someone to do a conceptual index (hard
> to imagine anyone doing it for free). Trouble is,
> even if we did that, keeping it up to date would be hard.
>
> Happy to be proved wrong, of course. I suspect
> you are the best person here to advise, David?

In the experience of most publishers, the best indexes are usually
produced by professional indexers rather than authors. But it definitely
isn't cheap--cost would range upwards of £2 or $4 per page-equivalent.
I shouldn't think it would be hard to find someone with experience
working with technical documentation.

Having an existing index with a good controlled vocabulary of terms
would make it easier to do indexing on our own going forward.

Is there any budget for paying an indexer?

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/