Using Acrobat to create a book index

[MentalFabric]

Hi all,

I've just been asked by a book editor whether it's possible to use adobe acrobat to automatically index a book (in pdf format). I've found the features in the advanced menu (in acrobat 9), but I can't tell whether the index that's being referred to is in fact an invisible index for the pdf file as opposed to a visible one that could be printed out (it looks like it to me).

Has anyone here got any experience with this?

Thanks in advance!

 

[dmz]

Acrobat don't do that...

The index Acrobat can build is not an index in the sense you are describing - it is an internal index for use in Acrobat only - no viewable index is created.

Adobe Acrobat is not a page makeup program and so you shouldn't expect to be able to do this - InDesign, Quark, MS Word and other page-makeup programs have built-in indexing features, but those are not used most of the time in the real world. Indexing is not a highly-automatable function, and in my experience, most of the publications I have worked on that had indexes usually had a specialist who prepared the index.

I'm not saying you can't use the index features in those programs - they are very good - it's just that indexing, and especially cross-referencing, is a highly selective process, so only the most basic indexes can be created "auto-magically".

Cheers!

dmz

 

[BradColin]

I agree with "dmz" in his answer ... I have tried using the indexing features for such programs myself but things were not that easy. The Index must look professional as it is an important way for selling books.

I tried to hire someone to create an Index for one of my books, but that was expensive, one of my friends suggested a program called pdf index generator to me that can help me create the index myself ... It was very helpful as my books are in *.pdf format + it creates the index terms as links that the reader can click to take them to the corresponding pages in the book.

The best thing about this is that now i create my book indexes myself, and no additional outsourcing is needed