Index? Cross-references?
- Thread starter Daddicus
- Start date
Don, anyone willing to spend $50 and some time (I'm tempted but I'm leaving town and wouldn't have a 2nd use for the app):
http://www.pdfindexgenerator.com/
http://www.pdfindexgenerator.com/
I spent the evening fiddling with a software library (http://nltk.org/book/) to pull out this sort of detail, but it's nothing like building an index. I half-have a mind to start one as a google doc and build it manually after my evening of fiddling with building automatic concordances and such.
I had a brief play with this earlier. I took the PDF, fed it through some scripts and ended up with a database of word-page pairs (excluding some common stop words). The problem is, of course, that it needs a human to go through and restrict the listing to the important concepts that should be in the index.
Otherwise the index just ends up being half the size of the book again.
Are there any good ideas out their for automating this further?
Otherwise the index just ends up being half the size of the book again.
Are there any good ideas out their for automating this further?
I was noodling on that very issue this morning. Thought I could make an online interface or something to interactively search through things, but it wouldn't be the same (at all!) as a useful index. I was coming at it from making a concordance though - quick lookup from a term to show the rough set of words around it and how it was used.
Since this is going to take manual effort to clear and clean to something useful anyway, I'm thinking that it makes more sense to identify terms and/or categories and subterms, then use the automated tooling to identify where in the text the relevant content exists (i.e. page numbers)
Hire a copy-editor who knows about Traveller or at least about role-playing. If you can't find someone like that, hire a copy-editor and someone who knows about Traveller and have them collaborate.
If there isn't money to hire people, try a kickstarter to raise it.
Hans
Yeah, of course Hans - I was rather enjoying discussing the how of building something like this myself. I'm not complaining that it doesn't exist, I'm enjoying the noodling around how it could be done.
Ah, I see. Well, most text editors have provisions for marking words and generating an index. I've done it myself for one or two fairly short texts. Personally I wouldn't care to do it for something the size of the T5 book, but if you enjoy that sort of thing, just start from one end and go through it. It's going to be a lot of work, and I don't think there are any short-cuts.
Hans
Someone could go through the book and start typing up tables and other sequences of making things in a text file.
Alphabetize them as they go.
Upload the file somewhere for proof reading so others with the T5 book can read over it for errors.
Upload the final result to the file library here.
Alphabetize them as they go.
Upload the file somewhere for proof reading so others with the T5 book can read over it for errors.
Upload the final result to the file library here.
So much easier to do this while writing. At least, I found putting \index{} markers through the LaTeX source of a book as I was going to be relatively little trouble.
Anyway... it looks like it'd be a painfully manual process. If I could identify the words of interest, I guess I could select all the pages (from the automated indexing I did earlier). I can think of more fun things to do.
Anyway... it looks like it'd be a painfully manual process. If I could identify the words of interest, I guess I could select all the pages (from the automated indexing I did earlier). I can think of more fun things to do.
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