InDesign index in other languages?

Question

I am writing a book in Gujarati and must set up an index. The index I got is in the English alphabet. I need to convert the alphabet into Gujarati alphabets. Can someone help?

Joel Cherney · Accepted Answer

I suspect it's because it's a feature request that simply isn't getting enough attention. The current development team is using indesign.uservoice.com to rank interest in bugs and potential new features by vote count. If someone were to post a "Please add Gujarati to index sorting options" I'd vote on it, of course, but due to the nature of the voting system, there are lots of requests for improvements in multilingual index sorting, or just Better Sorting For More Languages (for example).

While you patiently wait for your request for Gujarati index sorting to slowly acquire enough votes to get your request in front of the development team (can you tell that I don't like this method of handling bug reports and feature requests?), you do have some other options. I'd suggest a third-party indexing plugin or script, like IndexMatic3 from IndiScripts. It certainly seems like it supports Gujarati:

It's not a particularly inexpensive solution, but in the end it might be less time-consuming and therefore less expensive than e.g. making tiny little almost-zero-width invisible Latin-script characters and hiding them throughout your document and in your index, in order to force correct sorting. (Don't do that. I've done it before, and I'd rather eat glass than do it again.)

Peter Kahrel · Answer

As Joel mentioned, the only way to get additional languages into the Index panel's Sort Options window is to submit a feature request in User Voice. But that's completely pointless: InDesign's index feature hasn't been touched since its introduction many years ago (apart from a cosmetic change about ten years ago), and it doesn't look likely Adobe will spend any time or money on InDesign's index -- they're too obsessed with AI. And they don't realise that producing an index is a nice candidate for AI, but they think that the users want daft pictures.

Anyway, there is a solution. Generate the index without section headings, then run this Grep query:

Find what: (\u).+\r(\1.+\r)+\K(?=(.))
Change to: $3\r

This query looks for blocks of lines that start with the same letter, then inserts the first letter following the block after the block.

It works fine for Latin and Cyrillic scripts, it may need a tweak for Gujarati -- we'll see.

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