Page last updated by Hilary and Drusilla Calvert, 5 April 1998.
I have worked on indexing projects that no other indexing program could handle as elegantly as Macrex. It is comforting to know that my indexing software is extremely powerful and to date has been able to handle anything and everything I have thrown at it. It is true that most book indexing is not complex and any professional indexing program can be used. But all it takes is one quirky request from a client and the mettle of your indexing software will surely be tested. Macrex has never failed me. I do not spend time in a word processing program "cleaning up" formatting that the indexing software could not handle. I do not purchase utility programs from other vendors to manipulate my indexes; plenty of utilities are included with Macrex.
Today many people prefer to use a Windows program with pull-down menus, buttons, and icons. Frankly, I do not want that clutter on my screen. All I want to see when I am writing an index is the index. Usually, I want to see the index in alphabetic order. I want to move around quickly in the index. I often want to pull pieces of one entry and put them in another entry. I want to do this quickly, very quickly. I do not need to see the index in Times Roman or Helvetica fonts. When I am creating index entries I do not care how they will look in a particular font. All I care about is working in an environment that allows me to focus exclusively on writing the index. It is easy to tune Macrex so that various elements of the index are displayed in particular colors. For example, a quick glance at the screen makes cross-references obvious.
One of the most powerful features of Macrex is also the least understood. I am talking about volume/page number handling and volume translations. No other indexing program brings so much power to the indexer. Actually, no other indexing program has anything like this. Since I have done a lot of periodical and serial indexing, I have had many opportunities to use these features. I will provide a simple example. Let's say you have monthly magazine and you want to create an entry that will look like:
cat food, Feb:89; Apr:102Also, after five years you will provide a multiyear cumulation. You need to provide for entries that will look like:
cat food, 1997(Feb)89; 1997(Apr)102; 1998(Jan)56; 2000(Oct)25How will you actually type these entries in your indexing program? You want the months to sort in chronological order (January to December). You need the four digit year for the cumulative index, but you do not need the year to appear in an annual index. Setting this up in Macrex is simple. You would type in the entries like this:
cat food, 199702.89, 199704.102, etc.Macrex will automatically translate the two digits that follow the year as months. For the annual index, I tell Macrex not to print the four-digit year. However, that data is retained in the index files for cumulative indexes. As for the exact format for the reference locators, all of that is set up in Macrex.
The way that Macrex handles the months (02, 04, etc.) is through an automatic translation setting. There is also a way to set up user-defined translations. I had a project that used several hundred translation codes. I won't go into the details of this, but let me say that this is an extremely powerful feature. I maintained these codes in Microsoft Excel and then imported them into Macrex. It worked flawlessly. You may never have an indexing project that uses hundreds of translation codes, but it is nice to know that your software can handle extreme situations. When I am editing 80,000-entry indexes, I do not want to worry about how my software will deal with complex formatting. I need software that is more than capable, I need powerful software that I can trust. That is why I use Macrex.
April, 1998