Referencing: Indexes, Contents Pages & Cross-Referencing

I know that some of you will find this very dull and not what you're here for. Feel free to move on. In fact, why not go and check out what's left in the Precinct Omega Clearance Sale?

However, for those of you interested in the nitty-gritty of wargames publishing, you may know that a good index is one of those things that just creates a certain... frisson among the ranks of our hobby's grognards. I am, I cannot deny, one of those grognards.

I'm not one of those people who will sit down and read a rulebook from cover to cover. I will pick one up, flick through a few pages, say "yup, reckon I've got the gist" and then throw some minis of the table and get cracking (it is not impossible that this is a side effect of that ADHD I mentioned a while back). Anyway, as a result, I rely on a good index to help when I hit (usually in the first five seconds) a stumbling block in my comprehension.

When I first started publishing with Osprey, the biggest disagreement I had with Phil Smith was over his decision not to include an index in Horizon Wars. And that's one reason I later published one in Over the Horizon. But in those days, an index was something done manually by laboriously producing a spreadsheet of every reference to every critical phrase in the game and then copying and pasting the results of the spreadsheet (sorted A-Z) back into the book.

Let's take a moment, brothers and sisters, to remember the memory of those noble sub-editors whose indexing work too place even before the advent of Excel...

...

Anyway, it's 2023! And that means we have automatic indexing.

Not, like, truly automatic in the sense that it will literally just index every word in a book and let you remove the ones you don't want (I can't decide if that would be better or not). But automatic in the sense that I can set up a list of critical words and phrases, and the software will create an index based on those which I can then edit. Affinity's indexing process isn't the most intuitive system I've ever seen but, after an hour of Googling and skipping through much-too-wordy YouTube videos ("why yes, kettle, I do think you're looking a little grubby there"), I got to a point where I could just about handle it.

Creating a Contents page was similar. It did something very weird to the paragraph styles page but, once I jury-rigged my way around that, I got a rather smart looking contents page that would update automatically as I shifted the pages around. Very satisfying.

Finally, it was time for cross-referencing. And that's the picture above. On the left is a search that shows all of the incidences of me sticking in the words "page XX" and similar as I was writing the document (all of the ones left, that is - there were a lot more when I started). On the right is me resolving these by inserting cross-reference points.

As you can see, there are still a few left to go, but progress is going extremely well.

The referencing part of sub-editing is also a chance to pick up any minor details of changes in terminology along the way, but it is the last step before the final readthrough of the whole document.

Mech-level patrons and above are cordially invited to offer their services as volunteer sub-editors if they would like a pre-release PDF copy of the book to go through spotting any mistakes that I missed. This will be available on Monday and all mistakes will need to have been pointed out by Friday!