Re: INFO on add-ons

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Miles Bader wrote:

> In any case, I think you're overemphasizing the importance and difficulty of
> indexing just a wee bit; after all, programming reference documentation is
> different in many ways than documents in general (it's much more regular, for
> one thing), and the _most_ important index entries (the commands and
> functions being documented) probably _can_ be generated automatically.

I think good indices are extremely important.  Without them, a large 
manual cannot be efficiently used as a reference, since text-based search 
is too limited, especially when the subject string you look for is not 
included verbatim in the text.

In my experience, indexing functions, commands, and variables, while 
important, is not enough to have a good index.  You need a good concept 
index where users can look up subjects that are not in the text.  As an 
example, consider an index item "cut and paste" in the Emacs manual.