First question: If I create an index by marking words in the main document and adding them to an alphabetic index, is it possible to export that index as a concordance file I can later edit / add to?
Second question: If I import a concordance file for my index, then later edit the concordance (e.g. remove entries), what happens to those entries I removed in the primary document? Do they stay in the index?
Third question: My document has several pages of introduction (preface, table of contents etc). Is it possible to limit index entries to a restricted set of pages, for example, excluding those at the start?
Thank you
I am not aware of any built-in function for that.
As a substitute, you can select your index (create it as single-column to make later steps easier; you can revert to multi-colum, afterwards if needed), copy it and paste it into a text editor. Remove sequences Tab page_numbers. You have a proto-concordance file you can edit.
A concordance file is a device allowing you not to mark manually your document with index entries.
When you (re)generate the index, manual index entries and present concordance words are collected. Therefore if you deleted items in the concordance file, the entries corresponding to these “omissions” are removed from the alphabetical index.
Not with a concordance file: the algorithm is “dumb”. A word in a concordance file is indexed, no matter where it is found. It cannot be selective.
With special document architecture, it could be possible to do that, e.g. when you have one alphabetical index per chapter (independent from other chapter index). However, this requires to restructure the document as a master+sub-documents. But, I didn’t experiment and I am not sure that it can work because, ultimately, the final job is done in the master and since there can exist only a single alpha index, …
My 2-cent recommendation would rather be not to use a concordance file.
Create a “standard” manual index entry on your word with Insert>TOC & Index>Index Entry. In this dialog, tick Apply to all occurrences in For Selected Entry. This will mark up all occurrences (and you’ll get a hint about it with a gray background if you enabled View>Field Shadings). You then remove entries where you don’t want them.
This is probably less handy than a concordance file but you control exactly what you want to index (I think that semantically not all occurrences have the same importance and therefore do not need to be all indexed).
Thank you @ajlittoz for your clear and detailed responses to my questions.
With much appreciation
Michael