I will be working with a professional indexer of the old school — meaning that she prefers making her index on cards using a pencil while looking at a finished book whose pagination will not change — and am searching for tools that will lessen the stress involved for both of us. Neither index cards nor static pagination are a viable option in the present case.
Are there any tools that would enable me to show exactly what words have been indexed in a given line in some unobtrusive way — say by underlining or shading them in the text?
I am aware of the \showidx
package, which is useful. Its weakness in my situation is that it takes the whole page as its domain of operation, which it not easy for the indexer to follow; I'm looking for something that actually marks the indexed text, or at least makes \showidx
-like margin notations on the same line as the indexed text.
Best Answer
I'm just throwing this idea out there; not sure whether it might be of help. It is somewhat inspired by David's
showkeys
package:It prints, for every
\index
, a vertical rule showing the point of reference, as well as the key used (minus{
or}
, for simplicity) in\tiny\ttfamily
. Usingxcolor
one could make the appearance less intrusive by printing inblack!30
(say):\@theindexentry
prints the index-related content.\smash
takes care of any vertical adjustment, while the entire index entry is set inside a zero-width\rlap
to remove any horizontal adjustment.The definition of
\@wrindex
(in the presence of\makeindex
) and\@index
was taken directly fromlatex.ltx
.