Creating an index of topics organized by menu

Report · Jun 17, 2014

Our company has a 3600+ page manual for a software program that has been around for 30+ years. The software product is very antiquated - in fact, it's mostly a text-based program. Users navigate to the different areas of the program by typing in menu numbers, which is listed on the screen. Originally, the manual was organized by these menu numbers, but our new customers had a hard time finding information. A few years ago we reorganized the topics to be task-based, but we have some experienced users as well as our support staff that still want to be able to look at a list of the topics organized by menu number. In our last release, I did this all manually by printing a list of all the headings and their corresponding menu numbers, and added them as cross-reference links in the back of the manual. This took over a week and was a major pain.

Obviously, from a maintenance perspective, it's a nightmare. Is there any way that I can automate this process by using an index or modified TOC to do this? If so, what would be the best way to go about setting this up?

We are using unstructured FrameMaker 10 on Windows 8.1.

Thanks!

Jodie

Report · Jun 17, 2014

Jodie,

You can use custom markers to either create a list of markers, an alphabetic list of markers or an index of the markers (separate from a regular Index).

If you want to create an index, keep in mind that you can force sort orders by adding a sort term at the end of an entry in square brackets, e.g.

Menu Entry:sub-entry[aaa] <- the "aaa" forces this to be the first sub-entry under the Menu Entry.

You could use your menu numbers as one method to sort the index. It all depends upon how many levels you need in your index and how you want to organize items.You can have multiple markers in place to create various indices.

You might want to have at look at Steve Kubis' Index Tools Pro (Silicon Prairie - FrameMaker Products) or Frank Stearns' IXgen (Frank Stearns Associates - IXgen for FrameMaker, Main Page) to help make creating and inserting the markers a little less painful.

Report · Jul 28, 2014

Thank you, Arnis! This worked perfectly and save us a ton of time!