Damian

And, is it preferable to have words that have multiple spellings or abbreviations mentioned once using the > operator, or to simply mention every spelling?

Again, the format is:

Doctor Name [tab] City, ST [tab] Phone Number

For the index, I care only about the name. The names are already formatted as I need them, I just need to get them into an index.

I do a GREP find-and-replace with the following search string:
^[(backslash)l(backslash)u(backslash)d, (backslash).-"'(backslash)((backslash))]+

(Sorry, but my backslash characters get munged when I post.)

This finds strings starting at the beginning of a paragraph, and consisting of upper- and lowercase letters, commas, spaces, periods, hyphens, single- and double quotes, parentheses, and digits (for the heck of it): characters that appear in people’s names in Roman-based languages. When InDesign encounters the tab character, it stops the match. I restrict this search to text with the paragraph style I applied to all the listings.

I replace this string with a special character style. I include a special color with this character style so it will be easy to see what has been matched and what hasn’t. Then I run the IndexMatic script on this character style.

It only took a few seconds for InDesign to apply this character style to 6200+ names, and about 10 minutes for IndexMatic to crank out the index. Compare that to hours doing it by hand or even with a keystroke-saving macro.

I couldn’t have done it without stuff I learned from this site, so… thanks!

Good point. I’ve to add some extra parameters in the dialog to let users extend the GREP search scope.

That’s easy, but I need some time to analyse the different cases.

OK, here we have the culprit !! On Mac OS, it seems that InDesign DOES NOT recognize ß or other extra-Ascii latin characters AS a word letter!

If other Mac users confirm that point, that’s a InDesign bug, because the GREP [[:alpha:]] (Posix) and antislash w are supposed to match any alphabetic/word letter.

So, I’ve to rewrite the GREP command to get round the bug…

Nested styles need a general rule to be applied don’t they? So if it was the first word of a sentence or a em space text em space that would apply the nested style. I’m guessing it’s for body text, but the nested style has to have some trigger.

Is it not possible to GREP search the triggers and then apply a character style. You can find in between em spaces for example and you could apply a style to the text that you find. It wouldn’t affect the nested style either.

It’s just a matter of searching your text using the criteria you set up in the nested styles.

You could then technically use the FindChangebyList that ships with CS3 to find all the nested styles and apply the style that you want, in one big swoop.

Does any of that sound doable?

A second thing: words containing a descretionary hyphen do not appear at all in the index.

Robert

Marc,
I tried the two GREP-searches you suggested on “Meißner” and in both cases it finds “Mei” and “ner” but not the sharp s.

Robert

The first method — checking the appliedNestedStyle Text property on each character — could be a solution for short documents. But that’s so frustrating!

The second method, based on a temporary “conversion” of the nested style into something that Find could see, is a genious idea.

Hmmm, I’ve to think about it…