Scripture Indexing
November 13th, 2008 by Danny ZachariasI just had a minor breakthrough in the process of scripture indexing and thought I’d share it with the world. First, let me highlight the previous method for scripture indexing:
- go through the proof with a highlighter and highlight all ancient text refs
- enter all of those highlights into an excel file (reference in one column, page number in the other)
- sort the entire sheet alphabetically
- book by book, cut and paste from the excel sheet into a text file
- the most tedious part— amalgamate all identical references together on one line
My new method that came to me yesterday was during my reading of a PDF in the wonderful Mac program called Skim. It is a fantastic PDF reader that allows you make notations and notes in a superior method to any other PDF reader. The icing on the cake is that you can also export the notes. Any Skim highlights automatically copy the text you have highlighted, and indicates the PDF page. So, my new method:
- scan the PDF proof, highlighting all ancient text references. If the text is missing the book abbrev., add it in Skim’s notation. Also, if the ref was in a footnote, add that to the Skim annotation
- Once this is done, export the skim notes as an RTF file (a 5-second operation)
- do several find and replaces in the RTF file so that the reference is tab separated from the page number, and the footnote reference is tab separated as well (2 or 3 minutes of time)
- copy and paste the results into excel
- In excel, a new column needs to be made for the correct proof page plus footnote number (The pages registered in Skim are the PDF pages, not the proofs page numbers). Do this with a simple equation (column 2-15&cell 3)
- Sort alphabetically.
- the most tedious part— amalgamate all identical references together on one line
I’m getting it down to a science 
If you think there can be any improvements in this method, let me know!