InDesign Indexes – combine plurals and abbreviations

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
August 12, 2025
1 reply
208 views

I'm creating an Index in InDesign v20.5 and I need to merge similar plurals and abbreviations into one entry.

For example the fllowing all need to come under on Index entry 'Electrocardiogram'

ECG

ECGs

Electrocardiogram

Electrocardiograms

Help please!

I'm really struggling to find a solution...

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

What do you mean by 'merge'? Sorted together? In that case use the sort-order field in the New Topic window.

Kiki Lulu RAuthor

Participant

Thanks Peter. I need them combined ike this:

Electrocardiogram 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (which also includes the page entries under electrocardiograms, ECG and ECGs)

Plus an entry like this for the abbreviation

ECG See electrocardiogram

Kiki

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

Merging Electrocardiogram and Electrocardiograms is simple: just change the topic name in the Index panel. The same for ECG and ECGs. Then regenerate the index (all this assuming that you use InDesign's index). But then merging ECG and Electrocardiogram is another matter, that's not trivial and requires a script.

If there aren't too many of these you can the following. In the generated index, starting from this:

ECG 1, 3, 5

Electrocardiogram 2, 4

change that to

ECG see Electrocardiogram

Electrocardiogram 1, 3, 5

Electrocardiogram 2, 4

The us this script: https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/index_update.html to merge the two. You can ru the script against the whole index.

It's pssible to do a script that does this this in one go, but as I said, that's not trivial.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded