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Is there any way to auto-gererate an index for the makeidx package? I've written ~270 pages and didn't think of adding \index{} everywhere.

Do I really need to go over everything and add \index{}?

Caramdir
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Filip Ekberg
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    What words should be indexed? If they are marked in some way (\cs{word}) you can modify the definition of \cs. Otherwise I'm afraid that there's only one way. – egreg Jun 10 '12 at 13:16
  • Related: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/54518/outputting-parameter-of-index – lockstep Jun 10 '12 at 13:17
  • @egreg, Ideally I would want to have a file that specified keywords that was extraced from the text. So I could remove/add to that. – Filip Ekberg Jun 10 '12 at 13:21
  • It depends on the index you want; in general not every occurrence of a word is indexed. – egreg Jun 10 '12 at 13:23
  • True. I guess maybe I do have to go over the text and add \index{} then! – Filip Ekberg Jun 10 '12 at 13:24
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    @FilipEkberg: This process could be simplified by the search and replace function of your editor. – Thorsten Donig Jun 10 '12 at 13:25
  • @FilipEkberg Reminder: your query-replace should change aword to \index*{aword}. – Ethan Bolker Jun 10 '12 at 13:30
  • @EthanBolker, Thanks. \index*{} also prints the word I guess? – Filip Ekberg Jun 10 '12 at 13:40
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    Also related: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/856/is-there-an-automatic-process-to-create-index-creation – Caramdir Jun 10 '12 at 16:11
  • Like others I believe there is no way around doing some real manual work. But if you are curious about word frequencies and you are on a Unix system, you might try something like this: cat file.tex | tr ' A-Z' \\012a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr. – Christian Lindig Jun 10 '12 at 16:21

4 Answers4

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Do I really need to go over everything and add \index{}?

Unfortunately yes. At best even if you write a script to automate it you will end up with a concordance, and a concordance is not an index.

In my opinion it is actually better to postpone the writing of the index to the time the book is almost ready. Writing an index is an art and most publishers employ "human indexers" to write an index that is useful and serves its function.

Since luckily, you missed it the first time round this is a good time to give it a bit of a thought and planning, before you delve into it.

The most important points to consider when developing an index, is categorization and consistency. Think of the likely readers of your book (or even the older you that will forget what the younger you wrote) and provide headings that are likely to be used when searching for information. Consider for example a historical book, describing early ships and their trade routes. It can be meaningless for example to just index the ship name by one word. Consider the following MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{makeidx}
\makeindex
\DeclareRobustCommand{\ship}[1]{\textit{#1}\index{Steam ships!#1}}
\DeclareRobustCommand{\AUports}[1]{\textit{#1}\index{Austalia ports!#1}}
\begin{document}
  One of the early steam ships to sail to \AUports{Melbourne} 
  was the \ship{Africa}. Its maiden trip was on the 1.1.1870 and 
  its last trip ten years later on the 13.12.1880. 
\printindex
\end{document}

I have used a heading to categorize the ship as a steam ship (you can add macros as necessary) and provided a second one to classify Melbourne as a port. By creating a number of commonly used categories around your topic you can also ensure that you have a good classification system as well as providing consistency. As you might have probably noticed the ship's name is typeset in italics, to comply with the Oxford Style Guide and by creating a macro both the indexing as well as the typesetting are done correctly and efficiently.

yannisl
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  • Could you maybe give me some pointers on how to write a good index? And maybe what pitfalls that I would have gone into? What I've done now is that I've looked up keywords and "concepts" that I talk about and adding a corresponding index to that paragraph/page. – Filip Ekberg Jun 10 '12 at 19:21
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    @FilipEkberg It is getting a bit late here, but I will post some pointers tomorrow. – yannisl Jun 10 '12 at 20:05
  • did you have any additional pointers? :) – Filip Ekberg Jun 12 '12 at 06:40
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    @FilipEkberg Please see edit. – yannisl Jun 12 '12 at 08:13
  • Thank you. Just to clearify, do you "always" need to have the word that is indexed in italic in text? – Filip Ekberg Jun 15 '12 at 08:51
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    @FilipEkberg No the word in the example is a ship name and hence the italics. For most it will be normal upshape text. – yannisl Jun 15 '12 at 09:42
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    Thanks for this solution. Note, if you run the MWE above here the ship name is in monospace as the wrong formatting command, i.e. \texttt{} instead of \textit{} in the \DeclareRobustCommand{\ship}. Sorry for apparent pedantry but the MWE is confusing, especially if you don't know where the italics are (supposedly being set. – mwra Jun 11 '20 at 14:54
  • @mwra you right my bad, will fix it. Thanks for picking it up. – yannisl Jun 16 '20 at 12:13
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I know this is an old thread, but I want to mention that I have just released a piece of software to address this problem. It isn't perfect, but as a "semi-automatic" solution it is a lot faster than going through with a text editor and adding the \index{} tag one at a time. It contains one program that reads your LaTex file and uses various heuristics to suggest terms that should be in an index, and another problem to rapidly browse through your LaTex file and insert the terms. It is GPL and you can download for free at https://sourceforge.net/projects/indexmeister/

The same page also has a link to a short YouTube video tutorial I made showing how the software is used. Hopefully, it will be useful to someone. I'm already using it in-house in my small publishing company.

Kevin A. Straight
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    Welcome to TeX.SX! Thank you for sharing your solution. Could you please show with an example how it works? Having the link is certainly great, but the readers would benefit a lot from a concrete example. – Claudio Fiandrino Dec 11 '15 at 19:52
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    Usage example from the command line:

    To generate a list of suggested words and phrases to index:

    `indexmeister example.tex > terms.txt`

    To browse through the list of terms, seeing all occurrences in the project (i.e. every .tex file in the working directory), with the ability to rapidly insert tags:

    `imbrowse terms.txt`

    The second program has an interactive menu-driven interface, I have a video and screenshots on the Sourceforge page.

     – Kevin A. Straight Dec 13 '15 at 04:22
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    Is this GitHub repo yours: https://github.com/longhunt/indexmeister ? Is this where current development is occurring, or is development continuing at the SourceForge page? – Geremia Apr 20 '18 at 22:30
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I have managed to get good results from https://github.com/feup-infolab/latex-index-tools

It is a python tool that first obtains the concepts, then allows you to edit the list of concepts and then auto inserts the concepts as \index in your latex files. It worked well for me.

Mohsen Banan
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Here is a simple Python solution: https://github.com/themoodymann/IndexTex. It indexes definitions, captions, theorems, and emphazised words in all .tex files that are stored in a directory.

rog
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  • Welcome to tex.sx. This is an interesting suggestion, but if a term that ought to be indexed isn't already emphasized or marked as something special (theorem, etc.), it won't be included. So there could still be quite a bit of manual work left. – barbara beeton Mar 21 '20 at 16:06