☞ Index

An index can be many things, typically related to pointing, informing, locating.

With $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$, indexing can beautiful but also painful. There is makeindex, that is quite powerful but suffers from various annoying shortcomings.

Hacking the .ind by hand

These shortcomings, you can often address by hand. This has to be done in the .ind file, which is where the raw indexing information is stored in direct $\mathrm{\TeX}$ form. For instance, you can have your index displayed in three columns by adding:

\begin{theindex}
\begin{multicols}{3}
 ...
\end{multicols}
\end{theindex}

The line-break killer

One dreadful problem of makeindex is that if you have this entry\index{this
entry} and that elsewhere it comes out as this entry\index{this entry}, being, this time, on the same line in the text source (as shown in this snapshot), then your .ind file will come up with something like:

  \item this   entry, 525
  \item this entry, 529

which, clearly, you don't want (the difference will be ignored by $\mathrm{\TeX}$ thus producing two identical entries with different page numbers. Terrible. I propose this solution as a cheap but so far working remedy.