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user7048405
Participating Frequently
April 16, 2023
Question

How would one create this index

  • April 16, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 830 views

I have nearly 300 InD files that I want indexed. I want individual indexes for each file and I want a single index for all files. I want the index to include Author names and Book titles and I’d like the book titles to include the links to the associated buy pages. So in the index of all of the files, I’d like it to look something like:

Author Book Title Volume Page
Child, Lee Killing Floor 08/2019 22
Die Trying 08/2018 1
Sandford, John Rules of Prey 10/2019 5
Shadow Prey 08/2021 13
Eyes of Prey 07/2018 2

The author names are preceded by a new paragraph and are immediately followed by the Book Title which contains a hyperlink to the associated buy page on the webstore. So they might look like this:

Andrews, Brian/Jeffrey Wilson. Dempsey  (Blackstone $16.99). Perfect for fans of The Terminal List and The Gray Man, we follow John Dempsey, a Navy SEAL under deep cover in a...

Burgess, Doug. A Legacy of Bones  (Poisoned Pen $16.99). A well-placed stick of TNT ignites a full-blown investigation in a provocative murder mystery exploring the racial and cultural...

Is this something that I would need IndexMatic 2 or 3 for? Any help would be much appreciated.

 



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3 replies

Peter Kahrel
Community Expert
Peter KahrelCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 17, 2023

If you have 300 newsletters in InDesign files then you shouldn't export them to Word. You simply shift the problem from InDesign to Word and you'd have to re-import everything to InDesign again (probably).

 

InDesign is eminently scriptable and what you're after is doable. It's not trivial, but can be done. You'd have to hire someone to write the script for you. Since you were enquiring after IndexMatic 2 and 3, maybe get in touch with their author, Marc Autret, and see what he can do.

U
user7048405Author
Participating Frequently
April 17, 2023

Thanks. I dropped him a note

Peter Kahrel
Community Expert
Peter KahrelCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 17, 2023

The only way you can accomplish this is with a custom script. IndexMatic3 will do some things for you, but not e.g. adding the links, and (probably) not formatting the entries the way you want them.

 

For the record, @James Gifford—NitroPress, there's no limit on the number of documents you can place in a book. But there is a limit (of about 130) to the number of files that InDesign can have open at the same time. And because InDesign wants all book files open to create the index, a book must contain fewer than about 130 documents.

 

P.

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    April 17, 2023

    I know the number of open docs and what the Book feature can handle in various ways is a little variable, but the rule of thumb I've picked up is that more than about 100 docs in a Book is going to cause one set of problems or another, especially on systems with less RAM.

     

    It's also a spidey-sense thing that when a project involves more than about 50 docs, without a clear and appropriate reason, it's a red flag that the project may not be well organized or thought through.

     

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    April 16, 2023

    Frankly, I'd do all of the data work and indexing in a better tool, perhaps Word, and then import the content to InDesign. Otherwise, you're going to have to bend InDesign's index tagging to the limit and do it pretty much all manually, unless someone can craft a script to do it.

     

    ETA: The more I read your post, though, I can't figure out why InDesign is in this loop at all. What you have is something like a database-based website setup, which could be managed from a database to some export web code, or from web coding into something like a simple database... and then if you need labels of any kind, import that to ID and format it. But InDesign has modest indexing facilities and only secondary web capabilities. You might be making the whole job much harder/more labor intensive than it needs to be.

     

    In any case, 300 documents exceeds InDesign's Book capability, so I'm not sure even exactly what you're asking could be done as any single InDesign project or task. As a start, and from a dim reading of your needs, it seems like 300 pages in a single ID file might be a more workable setup.

    U
    user7048405Author
    Participating Frequently
    April 17, 2023

    I'm sorry if I'm confused. The 300 files are all newsletters created over the last 15 years. You think I would best export to Word?

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    April 17, 2023

    As Peter notes, it's "doable" — but in no way is it going to be simple. (I had the hazy idea this was a series of labels or summary pages, something a bit easier to deal with in ID.)

     

    No writing tool like Word or ID is really set up to do this sort of multi-element, multi-document indexing. Anything with either is going to have to be used in multiple stages and steps. Maybe a script wizard (in either InDesign or VBA) could mostly automate the process, but it's not going to be a freebie.

     

    Honest answer? Do it more or less manually by creating a clean index document, in Word or even Excel, using as much cut and paste from each newsletter as you can and Word macros to automate chunks of the process. You'll be done with that long before you finish dancing with any more direct, scripted, index-feature-driven approach, and at the cost of only your own time.

     

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