From howard Fri Sep 15 17:16:50 EDT 1989 If you put \index{some stuff} in /usr/vol2/latex/latex.tex, between any two lines after the \begin{document} line and before the \end{document} line (and also not between any pair of \begin{eg} and \end{eg}, since those lines are printed verbatim), then after doing a mk in that directory you will have a file 'latex.idx' containing lines like some stuff<tab>249 Unfortunately, the <tab> is literally those 5 characters, so you will have to sed 's/<tab>/ /' < latex.idx to get what you really want. TeX just won't let tabs get into it or out of it.