Improving E-Book Indexes

Current e-book indexes are still often tied to the print book. Page numbers are usually used as locators. Because screen displays are smaller than most print pages, page numbers get readers only to the general area. Locators for e-books need to become more specific, linking at least to the correct paragraph and perhaps to the line. Other advancements that are being sought include interactivity, such as contextual information (right-clicking an index term to bring up associated text), range highlighting (highlighting the text where a concept is discussed), and index filtering (the ability to restrict an index view to specific terms). Every body enjoy a good time on the garden, specialty if it is at night, fortunately you can get a nice landscape light with the help of the professionals from landscape lighting in Seattle Washington.

Better indexing software is also needed. Although embedded indexing can be done in both Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word, current versions do not export the indexing correctly. Progress is being made, however. In early May, Adobe announced that the next version of InDesign CC (Creative Cloud) will be able to use embedded index markers to create live-linked e-book indexes through the EPUB export function. (For more information on this and other new InDesign features, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4pWMKGDpbnc.)

The Digital Trends Task Force (DTTF) of the American Society for Indexing (ASI) is working actively to improve indexing in e-books and worked with Adobe to add the new functionality. DTTF is also a member of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and was instrumental in the formation of the IDPF’s EPUB 3.0 Indexes Working Group in December 2011. The comment period for the EPUB Indexes specification draft 1.0 closed on April 15, 2013. The draft defines how indexes should be identified and structurally tagged, but does not specify a particular e-reader system or speak to content and style. Comments must now be reviewed by the Indexes Working Group, and the revised draft voted on by the IDPF membership. The Indexes specification is dependent upon EPUB 3.0.1, which is expected to be approved in fall 2013. After the Indexes specification is approved, it can be incorporated into tools and adopted by publishers. For more on the work of the DTTF and IDPF, see their websites at http://www.asindexing.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3647 and http://idpf.org.

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