[Issue] Alphabetical Index Hyperlinks

[Judith Tramayne]

Alphabetical Index at the back of the book. How do you hyperlink it to the word entries on different pages.

I can get the index to work but I don't see how to add hyperlinks to it like in the TOC. Maybe it's not necessary but it should would make it easier for readers of the book.

Judith

[Hagar Delest]

Not possible yet. I haven't seen any request for that yet. You can try a search here : http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/query.cgi (OOo Issue Tracker to ask for new features also).

[Judith Tramayne]

Thanks at least now I know not to waste any more time trying to figure this out.

Appreciate your quick response.

Judith

[Hagar Delest]

I've replaced the Solved tag by the Issue one : as it's not the first time I see that request and as it may be needed by many users, I was pretty sure it had been already reported and indeed. You should subscribe and vote for that request (up to 2 votes per issue) : Issue 61089 - Make index page number clickable.

[foxcole]

In my opinion, not being a developer here but having some experience with Writer and Word, this is easier said than done. It could very quickly become problematic even for experienced users. The problem comes in planning for the maximum capabilities of indexing.

A well-created index will have several entries for each type of information, based on how the reader might think to try to look up information. This means that each bit of information in the document should be represented various ways in the index. Also, many (if not most) index entries will be followed by multiple page numbers, and even a short document of, say, thirty pages can have a hundred or more index entries. That's just a short document... now imagine a book where the index is twenty pages long, double-columned, and many or most entries are followed by several page numbers. Under each entry should be further sub-entries, each also likely having multiple page numbers.

So, the design would have to account for serious index sizes like that.

Now consider all the pieces of data that make up a single hyperlink. Each hyperlink code contains several bytes of information, including the start tag, the target details, the link text, and the end tag. Not only that, the document body has to contain the target marker... itself two tags, to mark the beginning and the end of the index entry. There will be an amount of processing that must occur, too, for the program to create a link around the page number text in the index to the location of the markers. That's for one page number, one link entry.

Now multiply the scope of the index entries by the amount of data and processing that must occur for each individual page number in the index. The file size would bloat up to a point where users would be shocked and complain, and the processing time to create the index could well exceed the patience of any user.

Word doesn't allow hyperlinks in its indexing, either, and I suspect it might be for these very reasons. The amount of fire-fighting and complaint fielding and design challenges just wouldn't make it worthwhile to support.

That's how I see it, anyway. It seems such a simple request on the surface, but just because the page numbers are short doesn't mean the link coding is equally short, and the number of link entries in an index would massively outweigh the number of entries in a TOC. And what do you do if a link is wrong? How do you go about troubleshooting one wrong link in such an ocean of links?

[Hagar Delest]

Thanks for that crystal clear explanation.

If you're right, I wish the developers could write the same to justify the non implementation of this feature.

Anyway, this thread is now worth linking for next questions about that feature.