Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Perplexing Indexing

Delete All Index Entries

Someone went and indexed a bunch of stuff in my InDesign document. Now I'm trying to get rid of it, but it's taking forever to remove each index entry one at a time. Isn't there a Delete All Index Entries feature?

No, that would be far too easy. We do know of one way to remove all the index entries from a single story, but it's not necessarily for the faint of heart.

Place the text cursor inside the story and choose File > Export.

In the Export dialog box, choose Adobe InDesign Tagged Text from the Format popup menu and click the Save button.

In the InDesign Tagged Text Export Options dialog box, choose the Verbose option and then click the OK button.

Now open the file you exported in a text editor that supports GREP searching. On the Macintosh, you might use a tool such as BBEdit or TextWrangler. On Windows, you could use NoteTab or WildEdit. There are free or low-cost versions of all of these.

Perform a Find/Change in the text editor for:

<IndexEntry.*>>

(That's "regular expression" talk for "any string of text that starts with '<IndexEntry' and ends with '>>'.)

Leave the Replace With (sometimes called "Change To") field empty so that the program will replace the result with nothing.

Click Change All (or Replace All, or whatever the tool calls it).

Save the document under a new name.

Switch back to InDesign and use File > Place to import the new tagged text file into a new document. The index entries should be gone.

Note that this won't actually remove the entries or the topics from the original InDesign document; it just removes them from the story itself.

Where's That Index Topic?

I have over 200 index topics in my index and now I can't remember whether I've indexed "spleen" as a secondary index topic under "organs" or "body parts." Isn't there some way to search through my index entries?

Adobe decided that only the most die-hard indexers should be able to search through index entries, so they hid this feature. You can find it by choosing Show Find Field from the Index palette menu (Figure 7-4). Now type "spleen" in the find field that magically appears in the palette and click the Find Next button (that's the one that looks like a down arrow).

Correctly Place Cross-refs in Index

InDesign always puts my cross-references (like "See also Elephants") immediately after the first-level index entry, but I want to put them at the bottom of my list of second-level index entries. That way, the reader will only see it after reading through the list of subtopics.

No problem: make a dummy second-level index entry named "zzz" and set its type to cross-reference. Because of its name, it will fall at the bottom of the second-level index entries. Later, after you build your index, perform a Find/Change to search for "zzz" and delete them. The cross-reference will remain.