I need to do an index of names. I'll be able to get hold of the files that have all the references listed. I'm told others have written macros that can strip all the stuff out of each ref entry, leaving the names only, but I can't figure out an easy way to do it. I have Quickeys which I have never used to its full capacity. The files will be Word files. The refs are standard, like,
Author, A. A. (date) Book or Article Title. Maybe Some Editors and another book title, Journal Info, Etc. vol. 2(23) or whatever, etc.
Some chapters have non-standard format and the dates are at the end, or somewhere else altogether.
All I want are the names and the dates, which I can then turn into tab-delimited lists to import to Cindex where I can use the autotype feature to add the page locators.
Any ideas? I don't need this until next week, so don't leave your dinner tables to help me out!
If you know a little programming, macros aren't too difficult to write. What
you need in this case is a set of rules so that the macro can find and extract
the information you need.
If your author name is always at the beginning, you can tell the macro to start at the beginning and take everything until the first comma. If you want the initials, it gets trickier, because some authors will have one initial, some two, and perhaps some a full name. Since your date isn't always after the name, you can't say that the name ends at the opening parenthesis, so you need some way to differentiate the end of the name from the beginning of the title.
Similarly, you need a way to identify the date. If it isn't always in the same place, you need to know if it is always a four digit year in parentheses, or whether it sometimes includes a month or something else. The macro needs a way to tell the difference between (date) and (23) in your example above.
Once you've figured out the rules, it's just a matter of telling the macro to look through the entry until it finds what you want.
Ideally, you could have the macro start at the beginning of the bibliography and create the list in order and not sort it in any way, so that if you look through the results and find a few odd-looking things, you can easily refer back to the bibliography and check what should be there.