Software, hardware and the web: reviews

This review is based on the CD-ROM version, which contains the 140-page book as a PDF file, together with four Exercises and their answers as either PDFs or MS Word documents. The package is also downloadable from the Monarch website. Max McMaster is a hugely experienced professional indexer, but writing an indexing guide for technical communicators is a challenge for anyone. It requires a delicate balance between patronizing authors with too little, and boring them with too much, detail, while avoiding the opprobrium of fellow professionals for over-simplifying. Perhaps we’re even slightly uncomfortable, as a profession, with all attempts to instruct authors in our craft? But Mr McMaster’s fellow author, Sue Woolley, contributes her expertise in IT support and technical communications, and it’s good to be able to report not only that together they have avoided all three pitfalls, but that I was frequently delighted by the ease with which they reduced apparently complex topics to their essentials. The book’s layout is clear and attractive, the development is logical, and examples are ample and well chosen. I had problems resolving the finest detail in a few of the screenshots on my PC using Acrobat 6.0 Professional, but this had no significant effect on overall comprehensibility. The authors begin by stressing that indexes are a tool for the reader, explaining their access advantages over tables of contents and full-text searching, and urging the special importance of indexes to online help files. They then stress the importance both of planning indexes before embarking on them, and of editing them once they have been generated, before progressing to an overview of MS Word indexing (as the commonest and most widely available embedding system). There is a briefer section on using online help authoring packages. Their targets indeed seem chiefly to be manuals and online help text – both areas notoriously badly indexed in the past – and Mr McMaster well understands the need to index problems and tasks, not the relevant operations and options, in the latter. The book is full of sound common sense and excellent advice, sprinkled with some forthright assertion about indexing rights and wrongs, one or two of which might just raise the odd eyebrow, while the authors’ estimated times for indexing operations certainly made me swallow hard, but the former at least are exactly what their intended audience will be looking for. And yes, readers are urged in certain cases to seek outside professional help, rather than index their own work. Although concepts like set-out and run-on styles and embedded indexing receive passing mentions before being fully explained, this is presumably why the authors have provided a glossary (it includes all three). I found it slightly more confusing that the text instructions for inserting see and see also cross-references when embedding in MS Word are identical, and that the treatment of page spans doesn’t actually invoke the pre-defined bookmark, although in both cases the screenshots provided ought to guide readers to the correct solution. After the glossary, the book ends – of course – with an index, which is surprisingly light (at only just over two pages it even violates the authors’ own rule of thumb suggesting ‘4%–5% of the length of the book’) but seemed highly effective whenever I consulted it. If this book, with its no-nonsense approach and practical advice on indexing, were required reading for all technical communicators, the world would become very slightly a better place.