Check out the new resources from the presentation “How to be the Interface between Publishers and Digital Indexing Techniques” by Terry Casey, Jan Wright, and Pilar Wyman (ASI Conference, Cleveland, OH on April 28, 2018). They are listed here and in relevant places throughout the DPI website:
Thirty years ago as a tech. writer/editor/translator I created an “on the fly” (not termed embedded) indexing concept whereby I could define an entry at any time while writing that would be included in the text. I called a routing to tack on a dummy time stamp locator code that was later replaced at final draft generation with the resolved page number. The entries were then collated at the end of the draft for editing and inclusion in the final draft.
It was a tool I tried to sell to the Interleaf/Sun DTP people whose system we used, but they weren’t buying. It wasn’t anything as nice as what there is today in the PC world, but I realized my desire to avoid last-minute panic index creation that was prevalent up to that time.
Today’s quest for ebook indexing seems to be where I was then. No one thinks indexing of ebooks is needed when you have “keyword searches” that can pull up 100-word mini-thesauruses. But who wants that? There’s no context-sensitive aspect, and the more you try to qualify a search the greater the chance that you’ll bypass what you’re seeking. No, I don’t think the people who see “magic” keyword searches as index retrieval tools have really addressed what readers want.
There was a saying way back in the early days of the onslaught of paper proliferation that IT brought with it, along with the wish in tech. pub. circles when managers were themselves little imbued with what made good tech. pub’s: “Anyone who puts out product information without a comprehensive index should be damned the other side of hell!”