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Welcome to the list! It's nice to see new blood in here. [Oops! Should I
have mentioned so soon that it can get bloody here? :-) ] Just a quick
word of advice to take any responses to your questions with a sense of humor
rather than taking offense at anything. Most people here don't mean any
harm, but we can get a little crusty at times.
In my not-so-humble opinion, an index makes anything that you're putting
together easier to use. It's one of the tools available to bring a user and
information together, so develop it as much as you can. A "limited" index is
of limited use.
I think the general opinion is that people in the U.S. tend to use the index
for things roughly half the time while people in Europe and other places
tend to use it even more than that. (I might have that backwards. I can't
seem to find the thread where that was discussed.) Either way, that's a lot
of people turning to indexes because basic electronic searches and
hierarchical trees just don't give you what you might be looking for.
Here are a couple of posts on general indexing from recent months in case
you need some help getting started. Two of the posts are mine, and I'm so
enamored of my own writing and advice that I feel the need to share them as
often as possible. ;-)
As Geoff Hart said, it's not the length of the index that matters. It's
being thorough. When you have indexed the different ways in which one topic
can be looked up, you're done with that topic and can continue on to the
next one. Simple, huh?
Cheers!
Donna
-----Original Message-----
<snip>
1. Is it better to have a lot of index entries or only a few? (I would
like to have a lot, but a number of people here want to limit index
entries pretty strictly).
</snip>
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