Create universal indexes for your own books and papers

Almost every academic book has at the end of it an index ,which helps the reader find in it pertinent material regarding the indexed words or phrases. Using a more technical terminology, I can say that an index is a list of “dead” analog internal links (If you want to make them active you can use AutoBookmark, but this is for another post).

Nowadays it is quite probable that any young academic researcher  has accumulated a considerable amount of academic sources in PDF format. If he uses Mac computers, DEVONthink and Skim from now on he can create universal indexes. By universal indexes I mean that the active links are not internal to a specific source but external to any document that contains the indexed word or phrase and is in a DEVONthink database. You can see an example of a part of  a universal index in MediaWiki format in the following image:

The above text is produced automatically and you can see in it some of the conventions that I use in my workflow. For example the names of my PDF files follow the pattern “title – last name” and the corresponding MediaWiki page hat the “@” in front of the PDF name. The links named “correct logic” open the corresponding source in DEVONthink and all the instances of “correct logic” are highlighted. An example of a URL of these links is the following: x-devonthink-item://A6A8BAC2-B6E7-4568-A117-C74335C4C7BC?search=correct_logic.

Some advantages of universal indexes are the following:

  1. You can immediately see all the instances of the indexed word or phrase which are in each document.
  2. You can copy a part or the whole of it in one or more documents.
  3. You can freely annotate the index because it is just plain text. For example sometimes I find it quite useful to copy and paste the relevant excerpt from each page as is shown below:

The AppleScript which can create universal indexes is the following:

The result is sent to the clipboard. The script is generally slow especially when there are a lot of matched documents. The index is created either in MediaWiki format or RTF format.

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