indexing puzzle

["Kerala J. Snyder" kerala.snyder@xxxxxxxx]

Here is a challenge!
Back in 1987 I used XyWrite 3+ to index a book, and it worked fine. Now I
have reverted to XyWrite 4 (for DOS) in order to index another book, since
MSWord will not let me force the page numbers in its files to conform with
my page proofs. I have a very kind production editor who converted all
those Word files to XyWrite for me, and it has been fun getting back to
this elegant old program. I joined this list when I had a problem
installing it to my Windows XP computer, and I found the answers in your
archives. But now I have a real problem.
There are 25 chapters in the book, each in a separate file, and I am using
CORRECT to mark the words in each file and PRINT @ in order to create a
single index across all 25 files. Right now I am experimenting with a very
small list of words and just four of the files, named 15, 16, 17, and 18. I
created a parent file with these four file names (they are actually a bit
longer) in that order. The index that resulted was correct for files 15 and
18, but the page numbers for files 16 and 17 were each one number too high.
I looked through all the formatting for those files and could find nothing
wrong. Then I wondered whether there was something about being in the
middle of the series, and I changed the order in the parent file to 17, 16,
15, 18. (I left 18 at the end, because the formatting for the index was
there.) This time 17 and 16 were correct, but 15 and 18 were n+1 for each
page given. So the third and fourth in the series were wrong this time. I
ran it a third time with the original order and got the same result as the
first time. Clearly it can't be the formatting in the individual files that
is causing the problem, because the ones that were wrong the first time
were right the second time and vice versa. But it is not the ordering in
the parent file either.

Can anyone figure out what is going on here?

Many thanks,
Kerala

Kerala J. Snyder
Professor Emerita of Musicology, Eastman School of Music
kerala.snyder@xxxxxxxx