Comments on: Indexing a Range Rather Than Individual Pages

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:51:27 +0000

@Roland: I agree with you about Excel… it can be maddening!

By: Roland

Roland — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:48:03 +0000

Just wanted to say I officially hate MS Excel. Rather than saving into the text file only the selected fields or those that actually have content, it created ‘entries’ like this:
12345[space][tab]
12346[space][tab]

The second I figured that out, I did a find & replace in the text file to replace [space][tab] with nothing and then ran the script again.
15 minutes later all 1846 items have been indexed.

By: Roland

Roland — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:55:57 +0000

I’m not sure if it’s something I’ve done wrong or if I’m trying to do something InDesign (CS3) can’t do, but using IndexBrutal to create an index for data that’s entirely in tables doesn’t appear to work. I ended up waiting a long time (at least it felt that way) to only get the same 1846 items I’d fed the script returned to me.
Is it because data inside tables can’t be seen in the Story Editor?

I don’t make indexes regularly (less than once a year actually), so paying for a plug-in that’ll do the job is out of the question. But I really do need to get this index made before the end of the week…

By: Sander Pant

Sander Pant — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:48:44 +0000

I am currently making an index in a language with 14 declinations, (Estonian) so list of index entries should include too many of them to think about it.
As the index consists of names, it is good to have index palette that lets you choose from list of previous entries where you want the new one to go. I.e. if I have Sander and Pant in text I can ctrl+U them and select “Pant, Sander, a clown” in the index entries sub-thing in the index palette. Real shame that the index palette can not be resized and the scroll doesn’t work.

As I am indexing single occurrences of names, and some of them are often mentioned it is necessary that I use the page ranges, instead of a paragraph of consecutive numbers.
Could the feat described in the original question be pulled with GREP?

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:31:11 +0000

I’ve now been in frequent email contact with Marc, who’s very kindly sent me beta versions of “scripts pertaining to indexing” — including proper sorting of the Dano-Norwegian alphabet. He’s doing terrific work in this field, and I’m very grateful to him — and I just wanted to publicly pat his back a little. Do go to his website and try out his indexing script — it rocks! (As does the other scripts he’s working on.)

By: Mostafa

Mostafa — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:41:12 +0000

Hi
I need uknow aboutAUTOMATIC PAGING
of Indesign .
PLEASE HELP me

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Mon, 19 May 2008 22:47:51 +0000

Thanks, Marc, for your explanations. I’ll email you privately soon.

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 19 May 2008 22:24:18 +0000

Sacha, Klaus, Thanks for all your comments and suggestions. I don’t want my script to “engulf” this discussion, so I’ll try to answer shortly:

“Add several levels to the index” ? Just an idea: set to false the SORT_TERMS var in the script and try to use a custom tab marker (§ for example) in the TERM syntax:
key1|section
key2|§sub-section
key3|§§sub-sub-section
…
After index generation, replace § by tab (\t).

“keeping the number of occurrences of each word in the text”? Very possible, but you’ve to hack the script (before a next version). Try to deal with the TIndexList.prototype.scanPages() method. The number of current term occurrences is results.length…

“alphabetic sorting mechanism”? You’re right, the Scandinavian specific alphabet (and probably other ones!) is mistreated. Universal sort is a hard problem! The script overwrite the default Javascript Array.sort() method (awfully based on Unicode numeric codes!). I explain here how to improve it : http://marcautret.free.fr/geek/indd/indexbrut/#S6
As you see, French words (with diacritics) are correctly sorted by IndexBrutal (because that’s the alphabet I know). The static properties String.DIAS and String.DIAS_TO_ASCII provide a Unicode-to-Ascii “immersion” used by the smartAlphaComp() function. We could adapt or extend this code in a more universal way, but that’s not so simple. From one language to the other, a same Unicode character does not take up the same rank in the alphabet… (I suppose.)

For continuing privately the dissussion: marcautret[[at]]free[[dot]]fr

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:59:47 +0000

Gabriel (#7 above): No, unfortunately, you cannot make an index based on character styles in InDesign. I keep hoping that they will allow character styles in table of contents (like QX does), which lets you sort of fake what you want.

[[edited july 08: Correction. See this post.]]

By: Klaus Nordby

Klaus Nordby — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:53:20 +0000

Marc, not to rain on your great parade, but I’ve found a bug. The alphabetic sorting mechanism doesn’t know what to do with the Scandinavian æøåÆØÅ characters, so words with those letters are sorted . . . weirdly (e.g., “o” and “ø” are mixed together).

I’ve not checked with other non-standard characters (from a French and English perspective!), but it’s conceivable that letters used in other languages might also be sorted . . . weirdly?

I can easily sort the lines of your TXT file properly in a text editor, so this bug is no great problem for me — but I thought I’d tell you and others about my finding.