Authoring Tips: Automatic Indices

This is a great feature for those of you creating or uploading textbooks to Connexions. Connexions will create an automatic index of terms and keywords which you can specify; this index will appear in the back of the downloadable PDF of the collection and contains the term or keyword as well as the page number or section it can be found in.

Two different elements will get pulled into the index: keywords and <term>.

Keywords

You can specify keywords for each module or for the collection as a whole under the metadata tab. The green metadata tab can be found underneath the module title; click it to edit the metadata. Enter in keywords (one per line) and click the "Save" button.

Keywords will be pulled in to your index with a section reference (referencing the module it refers to); keywords on a collection level will have references to every module within the collection, so some people like to leave them out. Keywords have the extra bonus of making your content more searchable.

Terms

The <term> tag is meant to mark words that are important to the text or defined in a text, like the <term>Pythagorean Theorem</term> in math or <term>classical conditioning</term> in psychology. They are set off as bolded text. Terms will be displayed in the index with reference to the specific page they occur on. Not too shabby, eh?

Next week we will show you another great trick for textbooks: how to create a Glossary in a module or collection, and how to turn <term>s into links that point to definitions in the glossary.