|
||||||
|
||||||
|
SKY Index Professional 8.0 Tips and Techniques NOTE: The tips below apply to SKY Index Professional 8.0 (SI8) and are based on the SKY Index Professional 6.0 tips that were extracted from the SKYIndexUsers Archive of Yahoo’s eGroups forum and posted by Michael Wyatt. They have been modified where applicable to work properly with SI8, to provide more clarity and to better describe the problem being solved. Although we have no reason to doubt the accuracy of these tips, they have not been tested by SKY Software and it is recommended that you try these tips on a test index prior to use as part of your daily indexing. ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP OF IMPORTANT INDEX DATA BEFORE PERFORMING A SIGNIFICANT EDITING TASK!!! Tips: Entering International Characters Automatic Initial Caps: How to set and override them Splitting a main heading into main plus subheading (Demoting) Managing page references (incrementing/decrementing) Applying a font the way you would a character style (Alternative fonts) Locators containing a leading zero Dealing with lengthy heading text Printing a draft of your index Embedding index entries in Word files Creating a spell check dictionary file from an index Right-clicking for the context menu Duplicating a heading as a subheading, or a subheading as a heading Using an ellipse to begin a list of locators Quickly go to the target of a cross-reference How to duplicate an entry and swap the main and subheadings How to create main headings from the subheadings of an existing set of entries How to post all subheadings of an existing heading under a synonymous heading How to keep track of both subjects and authors in a combined subject/author index Demoting part of a heading for multiple records How to rename a main or subheading that has many subheadings Splitting a main heading into main plus subheading (Demoting) Sometimes you will have established a compound heading in the form of a phrase, and then you find you need to split it into a heading plus subheading. How do you do this easily if you have already attached a number of locators to the heading? Note: SKY Index includes a Demote command that will search for a comma within a heading and use that as a dividing point. If no comma exists, you can place the text cursor where you want the division to occur. The text before the comma will remain at the current heading level and the text after the comma will be moved down one level. If there is already text in the subheading level, the demoted text will be prepended to the existing text followed by a comma. Let's say you have established the heading "goals at work" and attached half a dozen page references. Now you find that "goals" have cropped up in a different context, so you want to change your earlier entries to the heading "goals" with the subheading "at work". If there is more than one record in the grid with the same main heading, the technique below will allow you to demote every record simultaneously. In the Index Pane
In the Grid
Automatic Initial Caps: How to set and override them To enable automatic capitalization of the first letter of every main heading, do the following:
Tip: For those entries that you need to override this setting, type a semicolon as the first character. The semicolon will be ignored (will not appear in the generated index) and the first letter of the heading will not be capitalized. General In SI8, you apply formatting to individual strings of characters text in the same way as you would in your word processor. If the formatting runs to the end of the cell, you don't have to switch off the formatting; SKY Index will do that for you automatically when you move to another cell. Although you can't see the formatting codes, they are there. If you want to see the text including the formatting codes, you can do so by choosing View>Reveal Codes. (Ctrl+Alt+E). AutoComplete and Formatted Text For example, let's say you are indexing a book on the history of cinema, where there are going to be a lot of names of films in italics. You know you have already typed in "Battleship Potemkin" in italics, and you can't face typing it again, so you want AutoComplete to do it for you. For AutoComplete to complete your typing you must begin by typing "/i1Battleship ...". (You can set up a macro to insert "/i1"). To check this out, type a couple of headings in italics or bold and then look for them in the AutoComplete Manager. Find/Replace and Formatted TextSimilarly, let's say you want to find all records that contain a cell at any level that begins with the word "Battleship" in italics. In the Find/Replace dialogue box's Find What textbox you would type: </i1Battleship. Check it out by typing some text in bold, italics, or underlined, highlight it and press Ctrl+F -- the highlighted text appears in the Find What textbox together with its codes. Neither the Find What textbox nor the Replace With textbox allows you to insert formatted text in the same way as the data entry grid. Instead, you can insert formatted text by typing the formatting codes either side of it. Maybe this sounds like a bit of a hassle, but it actually has an enormous benefit: It means that you can find and/or replace the formatting itself without having to specify text. Let's say you need to change all italic page references to bold -- in the Find What textbox you would type /i, and in the Replace With textbox you would type /b, and choose the Page field. Hide and Ignore textAlthough the methods for invoking Hide and Ignore text remain the same as in version 5.1, the codes that version 6 inserts are different. You will notice that under default conditions, Hidden text is displayed in the data entry grid as blue, and Ignored text is displayed in green. However, the codes that SKY Index inserts in the background are /z1 and /z0 either side of Hidden text, and /y1 and /y0 either side of Ignored text. Check it out: code some text as Hidden or Ignored, highlight it and press Ctrl+F. Thus, if you are using AutoComplete for the name McDonald, for example, and you know that you have "hidden" an "a" between the M and the c, you would need to begin typing: M/z1a/z0cDonald. Reveal codes You can switch on the display of formatting codes: Choose Options > Program Options, click the Data Entry tab, and place a checkmark next to Reveal Codes. For most of the time it is a great advantage to have the codes suppressed. But I have occasionally found it useful to "reveal" them when I have totally stuffed up a "Hide/Ignored" combination and need to sort it out; or imported an index from someone else's TXT file and need to fix up a formatting mess they created; or I am using a monochrome monitor and have to be able to distinguish Hidden and Ignored text. Managing page references (incrementing/decrementing) SI8 has some new commands for incrementing and decrementing page references. You must be in View mode, but the marquee can be over any cell, not just the page cell. Note: Although the actual keyboard keys being referenced are period (.) and comma (,) we use the character above those characters '>' and '<' respectively since they give an idea of what will happen when the key is pressed (increase or decrease).
Applying a font the way you would a character style (Alternative fonts) SI8 now allows you to use unlimited fonts in your indexes. You can do so by selecting text and choosing the font from a list. However you can assign your three most used fonts to the function keys F1, F2, and F3 so that you can apply that font using Alt+F1, Alt+F2, or Alt+F3 in the same way you would apply a character style like bold or italic. To do that...
Applying the fonts: To change the font of a string of text, highlight the text (or to change the contents of an entire cell, change to View mode) and hold down the Alt key and press function key F1, F2, or F3. Tip
Note: It is important to remember that for the normal text of any index the font used to display the index in the SKY Index screen (set up in Program Options > Program Font) is generally different from the font used to output the index (set up in Index Options > Fonts). Only the Alternative fonts display and print using the same fonts. To insert an introductory note:
SI8 uses Word Styles to apply formatting to the various levels of your index if you generate the index in RTF or RTF (no header/footer) styles. It uses the names: Main, Sub1, Sub2, etc. Your client may instruct you to use different names. You can use any style tag name your client specifies by doing this:
Starting with SI8 you can now search directly in the Index Pane. To search in the Index Pane:
Tip There are settings in Preferences>Key Bindings that affect how different keystokes are handled when searching in the Index Pane. Please examine those settings so that you can setup SI8 to best suite the way you do your indexing. Locators containing a leading zero Unlike previous versions of SKY Index, SI8 will allow you to enter a locator with leading zeros. Just type the leading zeros if you need them. Dealing with lengthy heading text If you have a heading or subheading that is too long to be completely visible in a data entry grid cell, you have several options:
With the marquee over the cell you are editing (either in Edit mode or View mode, it doesn't matter) press Shift+F2. The whole of the contents of the cell appears in a separate Text Editor window. You'll notice the text is highlighted: to get to the beginning press the Home or left arrow key; to get to the end press the End or right arrow key. You can type as much or as little in the Text Editor box as you please: you can even type a small novel if you want. The Text Editor box works like other Windows boxes -- you can: * resize it: grab an edge or corner and pull it * move it around: hold down the mouse button over the colored bar along the top and move the mouse * maximize it: click the square in the top right corner. In the Text Editor box you have the full range of editing and formatting options that are available during normal editing, using the Text Editor's own Edit and Format menus. You can even use the normal editing and formatting keyboard shortcuts. The only thing you can't use is the toolbar icons (A warning: If you format text as Small Caps it will display in the Text Editor as strikethrough text. It appears correctly as soon as you exit the text box and move to a new cell.) In addition, the Text Editor has a great feature that is not available when you are editing within the grid: you can highlight text and then drag and drop it elsewhere in the Text Editor. If you hold down the Control key while you drag, the text will be copied rather than cut. When you've finished entering or editing text, either click OK or press the enter key to place the text in the correct cell; or click cancel or press the Esc key to abandon the changes. Printing a draft of your index To print a draft of your index, you no longer have to generate the index and then use your word processors Print command. You can simply choose File>Print draft and SKY Index will use WordPad to print the index directly. The advantage is that that there are fewer actions needed to get the index printed on paper. The disadvantage is that WordPad does not support multiple columns so your index will always print with a single column - wasting a certain amount of paper. In addition, the draft will not have headers or footers. If you have formatted text as italics, bold, etc., you can easily remove it: Highlight the text (or choose View mode) and either choose Format>Plain or press Alt+Ctrl+F10. If you only want to remove assigned fonts, choose Format>Remove fonts or press Alt+F10. SI8's default settings for an index may be what you'd like for a common starting point. If that's the case, you can create your own default settings. When SI8 creates a new index, it looks for a file named default.tp8. If that file exists, it will use the settings in that file as the default settings for the new index. Creating a default.tp8 file There are two ways to create a default.tp8 file. They are:
Once you've created the default index template, each time you create a new index, that default template will be applied to the new index. Embedding index entries in Word files You can drag index entries from SKY Index directly into a Word file, and the resulting embedded index entries will be formatted correctly for index generation. The Word file with its embedded index entries can be imported into any other program that fully supports RTF index codes. I have not tested many desktop publishing programs; I do know that Ventura Publisher imports the index codes correctly, but that Quark Xpress (the default industry standard in Australia) does not. Perhaps some of you could experiment with PageMaker, FrameMaker, InDesign, MS Publisher etc and let us know how well these import embedded index terms. Of course, you still have to create the index manually before you embed the terms in the Word document, but you do save yourself the time of manually retyping them yourself into the Word document+.
Notes:
Unlike previous versions of SKY Index, SI8 uses the Windows provided character map. This is because of the Windows Character Map's support of Unicode characters. Rather than try to rewrite what's already been covered on the Internet, we will simply provide a link to Microsoft's description of the Character Map: How to Use Special Characters in Windows Documents Acronyms are essentially a way for you to abbreviate lengthy headings that you know you'll encounter frequently in your current index. You can also use Acronyms for terms that you encounter frequently in all your indexes and put them in your 'default' index template so they are available for every index you do. When you type an Acronym followed by a space, the abbreviation is changed into the full text you've defined for that Acronym. Tips Acronyms now expand when you press any key that takes you to another cell -- enter, tab, backslash, or any of the cursor keys. There is an Acronyms dockable toolbar along the top of the screen. To set up a single acronym, simply click the <Add/Edit Acronym> button in the toolbar, and type the acronym and its expansion in the Acronym Editor. There is no limit to the length of the expansion. You can see the Acronyms you've defined to help you remember them. To enter several acronyms at once, or to manage your acronyms, choose Options>Data Entry>Acronyms. The acronyms and their expansions are displayed in a grid just like the data entry grid -- you can use exactly the same editing and formatting keystrokes as when you are doing data entry in the index, including Ctrl+; to append a new acronym and Ctrl+I/Ctrl+B for italics and bold. Pressing Shift+F2 with your cursor in a cell takes you to the large Text Editor, where you have the full range of options that is available when you use the Text Editor editing index records. There is no limit to the number of acronyms you can have, although only the first 40 will be displayed in the Acronym toolbar. To sort the acronyms into alphabetical order, click the Refresh button. AutoCorrect: Are there words that you consistently mistype? If so, you can use Acronyms as an auto-correct feature. Type the misspelt versions into the Acronym textbox and the correct spelling into the Expansion textbox in the Acronyms tab of your default template. Then whenever you type a word incorrectly, SKY Index will automatically correct it for you. For example, in indexing recipe books I invariably type "prok" instead of "pork". I have set up the acronym "prok" and its expansion as "pork", so that whenever I type "prok" SKY Index automatically corrects my spelling to "pork". If you follow an acronym with a period instead of a space, the acronym will be expanded but there will be no space after the expanded text so, for instance, if you have an acronym sl=school, you could type sl.house and have schoolhouse. If you follow an acronym with a hyphen instead of a space, the acronym will not be expanded and the hyphen will be changed to a space. When you are working in team, you can keep track of who created records and when they created them. The team leader can also edit records and record the date edited. When you create a record, SKY Index attaches to it the initials that you typed in Program Options when you installed SI8, as well as the date you created the record, when that record is modified, the initials of the person who modified it and the date it was modified. You can view all this information by going to the View menu and choosing Creator, Edited, Date Created and Date Edited. To retain this information when merging indexes, you must use Merge. You can't use Export and Import, because when you Export an index you lose the information about creation and editing information. The one exception is that the new IDEX (Index Data EXchange) import/export format will retain this information. On a couple of occasions I have had a client specify that page runs be treated in a non-standard way. On one occasion, a client didn't like the fact that "Aggressive" setting reduced 1095-1103 to 1095-103, which I had to agree looked pretty strange. Another client specified that page numbers were to be "aggressive" when only the last digit changed, but "simple" when the last two digits changed. Yikes! Not to worry, though. You can define your own rules by choosing Options>Index>Locators and then clicking the Conflation drop-down list and choosing "<Custom>". You will then be presented with a dialog where you can create your own set of rules for page range conflation. Click the question mark at the top-right of the dialog for details on the various options available and an example. Creating a spell check dictionary file from an index You've just completed a huge index with heaps of specialist terms, proofread it meticulously, and delivered it. The client was so impressed they want you to do another one on the same subject. Can you face all that proofreading again? Thankfully, you can use your earlier index to create your own dictionary of specialist terms. The instructions below look complex, but once you've done it you'll see how easy it is. 1. CREATE A DICTIONARY FILE:
2. EDIT THE DICTIONARY FILE:
3. SORT THE DICTIONARY FILE (2 methods): This method involves fewer operations, but if there are many duplicates you will end up with a larger and possibly slower file.
OR This method involves more operations, but removes duplicate terms thus reducing the file size
4. INSTALL THE DICTIONARY FILE:
Right-clicking for the context menu Some of SKY Index's most commonly used functions can be accessed using by clicking the mouse's right button. This saves you having to remember the keyboard shortcuts, or spending time searching menus for these commands. Hover your mouse over one of the cells in the data entry grid and press the right mouse button. (Note that you need to be in view mode.) A special menu pops up, divided into three sections: the top one deals with cutting and pasting; the middle with duplicating; and the bottom one with moving the contents of cells. Have a look at the context menu today -- it could save you a lot of time in the future. You can also right-click over records in the preview pane. When you do this a menu pops up with the same options, minus the cutting and pasting ones. I find this of limited value, since if there is more than one record for an entry some of the actions affect only the record with the lowest page number. Like to keep your hands on the keyboard? If you have a Windows keyboard, you can press the Context Menu key instead -- that's the one just to the left of the right-hand Control key. The context menu that appears acts on whichever cell is highlighted in the data entry grid. To select a command, either press the up or down arrows on your keyboard, or press the key for the underlined letter. Duplicating a heading as a subheading, or a subheading as a heading To duplicate a subheading as a main heading: If you type a heading followed by a subheading, you can turn that subheading into a new heading in its own right: Place the marquee over any cell and press Ctrl+F11 (Duplicate and Shift Left to Main - note that there is no menu item for this command). To duplicate a main heading as a subheading: If you type a main heading, you can turn that main heading into a subheading of a new main heading: Press Ctrl+F4 (or choose Edit>Duplicate & Swap). SI8 the option of capitalizing initials at the formatting stage instead of at the data entry stage. I much prefer this way, because it gives me the option of changing my mind (or more likely the editor changing his/her mind) part-way through, without having to worry about the capitalization of proper names.
But what happens when you enter cross-references? If you type a capital initial after "see" or "see also", the AutoComplete feature won't kick in, right? Wrong.
Many clients specify that they want "see also" cross-references to appear as subheadings, as either the first or the last. You set this option in the Cross-references tab of Index Options. In the Placement row of the See also column choose "First subheading" or "Last Subheading". But occasionally you will want to make a "see also" cross-reference from a heading that has no subheadings. Normally it would look like this: fruit, 20-25 see also grapes Some clients specify that if there are no subheadings attached to a heading, then the cross-reference must appear on the same line as the heading, either before the locators or after them. This may also be your preference even if a client does not specify it. For example: fruit, 20-25. See also grapes or fruit (see also grapes), 20-25 How do you do this? At the bottom of the Cross-references tab is a section called "Merge orphans to". By default it is set at "Don't". To get the cross-references to appear "before the locators in such cases, choose "Before locators"; or to appear after the locators, choose "After locators". Enter any punctuation and/or parentheses in the "Prefix" and "Suffix" boxes below. Using this strategy you can easily attain a format like: fruit (see also grapes), 20-25 grapes, 4-10 see also fruit green, 5 red, 7 When you install SI8, the American spelling dictionary is selected by default. If you live in a country that does not use US spelling, you can install the UK dictionary instead.
As well as accepting British spellings, this dictionary still accepts American spellings, so don't rely on it for an index you are converting for an overseas edition. Note also that it rejects words ending in -ise and -isation, preferred by some British publishing houses, and the norm in Australia. As it is not possible to edit the so-called "main" dictionaries, you will need to add such words to your user dictionary. (I'm not familiar with the spelling conventions in Canada and other English-speaking countries, so I can't say how well they are served.) Using an ellipse to begin a list of locators Those of you who are members of Index-L will have read the thread on alternatives to the comma or the space between an index heading and its locators. One of the suggested alternatives was the ellipsis. An example from a published legal index was provided: REMEDIES Failure to bargain How do you get the ellipsis character? You don't insert three dots, that's for sure -- otherwise a line break could occur between the dots, which would be most confusing.
Quickly go to the target of a cross-reference If you want to go to the target of a cross-reference, hold down the Ctrl key while you click on the cross-reference (in the page field of the grid). If the target exists, a pane will appear at the bottom of the Index Pane that will have the target highlighted. Note: That pane is editable so you can make changes to the target if you desire. How to duplicate an entry and swap the main and subheadings (Double Posting) In the grid
In the index pane
How to create main headings from the subheadings of an existing set of entries In the grid
How to post all subheadings of an existing heading under a synonymous heading In the grid
In the index pane
How to keep track of both subjects and authors in a combined subject/author index Label your subject entries with one of the nine available labels. You can then use the Filter function to view only the subject entries or only the author entries as described below. A label is applied/removed by holding down the Ctrl key and pressing a numeric key 1 through 9. To see only subject entries: Set the Filter dialog so that unfiltered records are hidden. Then check the check box to Show marked records. To see only author entries: Set the Filter dialog so that unfiltered records are shown. Then check the check box to Hide marked records. To see all entries: Click the Clear button on the Filter dialog. Demoting part of a heading for multiple records (This tip was provided by Michael Wyatt) The problem: Sometimes you will have established a compound heading in the form of a phrase, and then you find you need to split it into a heading plus subheading. How do you do this easily if you have already attached a number of locators to the heading? The solution: Let's say you have established the heading "goals at work" and attached half a dozen page references. Now you find that "goals" have cropped up in a different context, so you want to change your earlier entries to the heading "goals" with the subheading "at work".
How to duplicate an index entry, swap the main and subheadings, and then combine the subheading with the main heading separated by a space
How to rename a main or subheading that has many subheadings In the grid
In the index pane
|
||||||
|