Writers of non-fiction may be interested in the software PDF Index Generator 2.9 (February 2020) which is automated back-of-the-book indexing software for books. This latest release very usefully adds…

Ability to index footnotes automatically & list the footnote numbers of the indexed terms in the output index.

The software ‘knows’ it’s indexing a footnote, because it detects footnotes as being in a different font/size from the body text. Prior to this release you could add footnote numbers, but you had to do it manually. Not much fun, if you have 1,000 footnotes. But now the software can do it automatically.

The cost is $70, and I’ve never seen it go to a 50% discount even on Black Friday. It’s the best of about three choices, I’d say, and it’s the one I use. It’s now supported with a new 17 minute YouTube step-by-step tutorial, and there’s also a video demo of how to set the footnote indexing.

Basic usage for me is: first include footnotes and then filter by “Capitalised Phrases”; then add a filter to get “surnames; forenames” switched over; go through the resulting long list and un-tick the irrelevancies and mis-fires; then output the formatted index to Word; then (while proof-reading) manually slot in various un-capitalised concepts of interest to the likely reader. The result will not get you an invitation to the annual ball of the Society of Indexers, but is useful and should be good enough for a self-published book.

All of this is for a static index, not a dynamic index. By which I mean, if you then go tinkering with pages and shifting the text around, your index is kaput in terms of page-numbers. You thus have to be absolutely sure the book is finished bar some very minor typo-fixes, and the index is then the very last feature you add to the body of the book before the final-final proofreading.

Note that this is Java-based software and as such it used to require that you install Java and keep it updated (otherwise it’s a huge security risk). But with 2.9…

The Windows edition of the program now comes with Java embedded inside it, so you don’t have to worry about installing the right Java edition to run the program.

Anything Java is still a potential security risk, though, so you may still want to run it offline on an old laptop.