atw: Re: Paragraph numbers not page numbers in an index

This looks like a variety of legal text, but legal texts are rarely, if ever, published in Word or FrameMaker. SGML encoding is enormously important in the legal publishing field, and producing such an index from SGML-encoded text would be reasonably easy.

There is a lot of material about on legal publishing, and looking in other people's back yards is always interesting.

SGML systems for legal publishing are very expensive indeed, and you may not have one close by. And I don't think Word can actually do this task.

Freeware to the rescue. The LaTeX typesetting system, in conjunction with a package (add-on) called ledmac, can do the job. (A Google search will turn up the package description and some examples. The ledmac package was not actually designed for legal work, but it will do the job at hand.) The paragraphs are autonumbered by means of "\paragraph" tags placed in the original document, which is an ASCII file, and the index entries in each paragraph can be made to refer (through ledmac commands) to the autonumbering of the paragraphs, when the index is compiled.

Does this work exist? If the text has already been written, it would take only a few days to convert it to ASCII text and tag it, and then LaTeX it. Working out how to do the job in Word would probably take longer.

Dear old LaTeX. Twenty-five years old, and still outperforming everything else.



JH





Is there a way (or a way with some plug-in) to create an index in MS Word (or Framemaker) where the reference is a paragraph number not a page number? [Think of a legal text (or the AGPS Style Manual) where every paragraph is numbered: 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3 etc. I want the index to read like this: torts 3.14.2 not torts 21. Here, the index marker torts is on page 21 in the paragraph numbered 3.14.2.]



Cheers



Geoffrey Marnell

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