Creating Multiple Indexes in InDesign
Nicholas wrote:
How do you create multiple indexes in InDesign from the same book? For example, a subject index, an author index, etc.
I wish I could just tell you that there was an easy answer for this — just click the “multiple index” feature. But no. Instead, you have to rely on workarounds to get more than one index out of InDesign.
The easiest method (in my opinion) is to apply character styles to the words and phrases that you want indexed, and then use the IndexMatic script to create the index based on that style. It can do its magic on all documents in a book if you have all those documents open when you run the script.
Another method is to use prefixes in your index entries. For example, put an ! (exclamation point) at the beginning of all your “author” index entries. Then, when you generate the index, those will all be gathered together in one group. You can then remove the special character at the beginning of each paragraph easily with Find/Change.
Technically, InDesign does not support multiple indexes, however, there is a workaround. When creating the page reference (Ctrl/Command+U), InDesign opens up a dialog box with eight empty boxes. The left side is the topic levels. The right side is where the sort options are. So for example you could have an index entry that says: “Smith, John”. But if on the right side you type “John” the index entry would be under J. So to do multiple indexes you could type in the first sort box the number of the index and all the entries for that index would be sorted together.
Thanks for the ideas. Since I work inhouse at a Christian publishing company in Latin America, we publish some books with hundreds, sometimes thousands of biblical references. I found the character styles idea to be quite helpful. The trick was to go through and apply the style to ALL the references. This was accomplished by writing a very, very long GREP search that was able to account for all the possible combinations of biblical citations. RegExr was a lifesaver when doing this. I’d be happy to share that GREP search with anyone who is interested. Perhaps someone can improve on it. Thanks again for the tip on how to do this indexing.
I would love to have that GREP search!
Hi, I’m a newbie at indexing, and was hoping you could clarify / elaborate on the steps needed to do multiple indexing?
I have 2 indexes I want to build:
1) Index by Author Name
2) Index by Author’s Country
Previously you mentioned …
“Another method is to use prefixes in your index entries. For example, put an ! (exclamation point) at the beginning of all your “author” index entries. Then, when you generate the index, those will all be gathered together in one group. You can then remove the special character at the beginning of each paragraph easily with Find/Change.”
Please let me know if I have this correct:
1 – add “!” or other symbol n front of first index type (ie: author name) Do we place each name accordingly in the index (ie: !Smith, Bob – gets placed in the Index Panel under “S”)
2 – Then do we place all of the “!author names” onto a page in our InDesign file?
3 – (Assuming we do step 2), At this point do we go back into our document and do Find/Change? Will this screw up the index we just generated?
4 – THEN, how do we go about generating the second Index (Index by Author’s Country) – do we just repeat above steps and then delete the symbol after the index is generated again?
If this is correct, how do we repopulate each INDEX if someone gives us last minutes changes prior to print? (If the “!” symbols are removed)?
IS this a task to be done at the last hour? Or can both Indexes be generated and saved separately within the file and updated at whim?
Thanks kindly,
Jane
Jane, the method that requires putting special characters in the name is not really useful if there will be last-minute changes. It’s what we call a “kludge” and is hard to work with. The idea wasn’t to sort !Smith, Bob under “S” but rather just put it under “!” and then later remove the ! and the other parts of the index and just work in the alpha headings manually.
Again, the indexmatic script is easy, free, and is a great help when updating at the last minute.
David, thanks for the script link, but it appears to be for CS2 & CS3 on a PC, unfortunately I have a CS4 and a mac. Just gives me an error message.
If I can get around “last minute changes” .. would your “!” suggestion still be useful for my case – to generate 2 diff indexes? If so – are there any clarification steps / words of advice I should keep in mind?
Thank you so much,
Jane