How do I create a book index?
What you do in Word (or FrameMaker, which is what I usually use for indexing a book) when making an index is mark each topic (not individual words — an index is not simply a big dumb listing of everywhere a word is found; that’s a concordance) under the different ways someone might look it up. For example, in a user manual, I might mark a section on a “network preferences pane” with “network preferences” “preferences: network” (in FrameMaker the colon indicates a subtopic; there would be a “preferences” topic and then a list of the various sorts of preferences under it) and “settings: see preferences”. If networking was a big topic in the book I might also mark it for “network: preferences” and maybe also “Internet: see also network.” Once you have gone through a document and done this with every salient topic, the software can then whip through the document and generate the index. Ideally you would be doing this as you wrote the document, but nobody ever does.
Step One is to find out from the school what the minimum acceptable standard for the index is (I assume it’s a requirement), and do not one iota more than that. If your friend is writing a 100 page scientific thesis, she might be using LaTeX, and there are indexing packages for LaTeX. It’s just a matter of marking the words to be indexed. If she’s not using LaTeX, she probably should be. A full LaTeX/bibTeX/postscript/etc setup will translate on the fly between different citation systems, will assemble your references section for you, will generate much better-looking and better-behaved math than Word will, will typeset much more nicely than Word and vastly more consistently (ie, no more having your pagination change because you switched printers), will directly generate PDFs, and all for free. Many journals also have style or class files that generate output correctly formatted and cited for that journal, and many schools have style or class files that will generate correctly formatte
