Hello,

I am hoping someone out there uses OpenOffice and specifically uses the indexing function.

I am hoping there is a macro or some trick to quickly add index entries for a document. Currently, I am trying to add an index for a genealogy book, I've written (still in alpha mode). This book covers about 135 pages at letter size paper and about 600 people. While the index will build all links to the individual,that means tagging 600 entries. Not fun. I know I should have done this as I created it, but it was created en-mass from a database and then edited. I originally had this in AmiPro, but I'll discuss that later. Is there anything to make it faster, or do I just need to bite the bullet?

Secondly, I'd like to know why OpenOffice doesn't import AmiPro documents? Just a rant I guess.

<more ranting> Has anyone used AMiPro in Linux? I used to use in on Windows machines and remember it being quite nice. AmiPro seems like a nice program in Linux, except very buggy. It moves footnotes around between openings of a document, loses the formatting on footers and has some strange default settings on paragraph styles. Not to mention buggy indentation, and several other bugs I don't remember. It has not been fun converting a document from AmiPro to OpenOffice. Also it has no capability to build a Table of Contents or the indexing function I'm using in OpenOffice. At least not one that can update automaticallly.

That is not to say OpenOffice doesn't have issues. Like changing the next page style on a page changes it for every page of that type, everywhere in the document! However once you get over that learning curve for OpenOffice, it's got a lot of great stuff.

</enough ranting for now>

Lastly, I'm curious if there are any peopel out there writing books in Linux and what they use? I've heard of Latex and such things for layout, but not really sure why you'd want to use them. They just look confusing as Hell.

Brian JD