A Better Way to Index Cited Authors

In my dissertation, I have two indices after my bibligraphy: Index of Subjects and Authors of Referenced Work.  In LaTeX, I had been using the index package for my purposes; this page provides a decent overview of the alternatives. The system works fairly well. Every time you find a place in the text which should be referenced by the index, you type \index{subject} for the ‘default’ index or \index[topic]{subject} for the special topic’s index. Then it ensures that there is a line subject in the index, and that the line has a page number at the end corresponding to where you inserted the \index command. Okay so far. You have to run makeindex during the document build sequence. Works as well as can be expected.

Trouble is, I am creating this list of authors, and basically I have to:

• type an \index command for every author referred to by a \cite
• make sure they are consistent
• type or copy these names that are already in my BibTeX database
• reformat them so they are properly alphabetized.

So painful. Why would I do this to myself?

A cursory look at the file formats indicates that doing this ad hoc in a script is going to be hard. Enter authorindex, the package that gives me what I want. It pores over document.aux for bibliography information, then processes it so you get a list of authors and page numbers, and formats this as something which looks like an index. Pretty tight. It will save your back. Check it out.