New Project Manager: "So we'll be publishing another edition of this book? We'll have to re-index it then. Did we count on the extra cost?"

Senior Project Manager: "Actually, we're just going to use the old index."

New Project Manager: "Uh...how's that possible? There's so much text reflow. The page numbers from the old index won't match the ones for the new edition of the book, right?"

Senior Project Manager: "Fortunately, we thought of that when we had the first edition indexed. We used BIM, and they wrote the index and then embedded the index into the text."

New Project Manager: "What does that mean?"

Senior Project Manager: "It means that they included the index headings in the text itself, but surrounded by tags which you can't see them without making them choosing an option to make them visible. We had BIM embed the index in Word files. But they can also do it in InDesign, FrameMaker or even DocBook and XML."

New Project Manager: "So what happens when we move paragraphs around or change the size and style of the text?"

Senior Project Manager: "The index headings move with the paragraphs. Style changes don't affect them. We then generate the index."

New Project Manager: "Generate it?"

Senior Project Manager: "Right. I know, that makes it sound like a machine did the indexing. Human indexers at BIM indexed the book, but after they embedded the indexing tags into the text and we edit and reformat the book, our software gathers all of the index entries from their locations in the text and exports an index file."

New Project Manager: "Which looks just like the previous index?"

Senior Project Manager: "Exactly. Except that the page numbers now correspond to the new edition of the book."

New Project Manager: What about the changes in some of the terms that we indexed? This edition of the book will use C#, not VB.NET, so lots of the terms will have changes in capitalization and file extensions and so forth. We will also probably add some new sections."

Senior Project Manager: "BIM's done this sort of thing many times. They'll look through the new files, check each of their index tags and edit them accordingly."

New Project Manager: "Do they charge a lot for that?"

Senior Project Manager: "A lot less than indexing from scratch. And it will be accurate. And since they embed the index, we can use the index for our ebooks and the online versions of our books, too. The index entries link right to the concepts that they refer to."

New Project Manager: "Well, then ... this might be easier than I thought!"

“Thanks once again for all the stellar work you do for us.” -- Brigid Duffy, Production Editor, Apress