Dear Carol: E-book Indexes, Elusive Endnotes, and Wildcard Searches

Dear Carol,

Everything has changed with the advent of e-books. As a new e-book creator, I’m confused about indexes. It would seem that the traditional format (item name, page number) wouldn’t work in an e-book, simply because of the lack of page numbers. However, I’m a huge fan of indexes. What’s the scoop, Copy Editor?

Anonymous

Dear Anon.,

Although I too love a good index, I usually find what I need in my e-books by searching. I like the way the search results on my Kindle show a snippet of text with each result, so it’s easy to see which of the locations is the one I want.

Unfortunately, this type of searching doesn’t give you the kind of useful organizational information you can get from a well-built index, which gives you a glimpse of the bones of a book and lures you from one search to another. An e-search doesn’t allow you to browse.

Some e-books do have indexes, but they are useful only if the locators are active links. Then it doesn’t matter whether the locators are page numbers or some other kind of marker, as long as they take you where you want to go. Let’s hope that in future more and more e-books will feature linked indexes.

Dear Carol,

Can you explain why a book would have endnotes, but nothing in the text to denote the note? No superscripted 1 or * or whatever? I’m reading a Penguin Classic and, because I’m a denizen of the twenty-first century and only a periodic visitor to the nineteenth, I had need of endnotes. But, as I said above, the book didn’t seem to have them; or, at any rate, the text didn’t give any clue that I could find endnotes at the end. When I flipped to the back of the book, it was with a bit of magic in mind; maybe, I thought, I could will endnotes to appear. And there they were. Now, I didn’t will them to appear—I’m not a wizard. But I’m left frustrated because how was I to know? And furthermore—how are endnotes like that even helpful? Do I just wait until I run across something confusing and hope for the best about my worst? (My worst being a lack of knowledge about historic episodes in and around St. Louis.) Bewilderingly yours,

Mike

Dear Mike,

Granted, Penguin might have listed “Notes” in the table of contents to tip you off. They might even have splurged on a footnote early on in the book—something like “Notes keyed to the text begin on p. 325.” But this type of documentation is not uncommon, and as a reader of Penguin Classics, you thought to flip to the back, as will other readers hoping to find notes. So . . . as problems go, this seems pretty low on the angst-o-meter. (Maybe I’ll try to will readers to send more urgent queries next time.)

Dear Carol,

Say you’re editing a document in MS Word that is divided into many chapters. But now you’re told that the author wants all those “chapters” to be called “sections,” pronto. If you do a simple search and replace for the word “chapter,” it would be chaos, since the document does refer to chapters in other books and uses cross-references inside the text. The fact that the chapter titles are written in boldface can help you search, because you can tell Word to search for Chapter ^# (Match case; in bold). However, the problem is that Word doesn’t let you use expressions like ^# in the Replace field, so you can’t tell it to replace Chapter ^# with Section ^#. So how do you replace something while keeping the wildcard in your search field intact? It’s a long-winded description, but I hope it’s clear enough. Thanks for your help.

F.

Dear F,

With slightly more advanced searching and replacing techniques, you can get Word to do exactly what you want. The Editorium “Freebies” page has a link to its “Advanced Find and Replace for Microsoft Word,” a detailed (and amusing) instructions manual for just that.

In the case of your chapters-to-sections change, open the Find and Replace box, and checkmark the Use Wildcards box. In the Find box, hit Ctrl+B (to search for bold type), and type the following string:

Chapter ([0-9]@)

This tells Word to find the capped word “Chapter” followed by a space, followed by a number between 0 and 9, followed by any other number (since you have many more than nine chapters). Next, in the Replace With box, type this:

Section \1

This tells Word to replace the first expression in the Find box (“Chapter” followed by a space) with the word “Section” followed by a space. The \1 tells Word to replace the second expression in the Find box (the numbers) with themselves. Thus, Chapter 1 will be replaced by Section 1, and so forth. (If you read Editorium’s short section called “Wildcard Grouping,” that explanation will begin to look a little friendlier.)

A caveat: You were wise to anticipate the chaos that can come from wildcard searching. Whenever you do a replacement like this, it’s safest to make the changes one at a time so you can check them as you go.
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Readers: Write to me at my Questions and Suggestions page!

Comments

[Federico Escobar]

Great answers; thanks! The Editorium's document on wildcard searches was very helpful.

[Federico Escobar]

Dear Carol: A quick question along the same lines. I recently switched from PC to Mac, and one of my trusted allies from the bygone PC era is something you suggested in this post: pressing Control+B to add bold in the Find box. I've been rooting around support pages for Office for Mac 2011, and it seems we are forced to click on Format... and then on Bold every time we want to search using Bold, Not bold, Italics, etc. Please give me the good news that you do know a shortcut. All the best with your new book, by the way.

[Carol Saller]

Federico, I asked my Mac pals and also searched briefly online, and I couldn't find a shortcut. Readers, if you can help, please feel free!