Workaround for indexing many files

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 1, 2025
3 replies
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Hi,

I am working on a journal which is a compilation of ads that are submitted in honor of an institutions honorees. The whole journal is about 1500 pages. I've been doing this for ten years and I'm wondering if there is a better way.

Until now I have created each ad as its own document. I know that is not smart, but I need to be able to alphabetize all the ads at the end which I do easily by calling each file with the last name of the donor.

However, since each donor wants to be able to find their ad I create an index as well. But the indexing process is a nightmare because I'm dealing with close to 1500 separate documents. Until now I've been putting them into books of about 100 per book, indexing each book, and then combining those indexes and manually deleting the multiple As, Bs etc so that it looks like one index.

Is there a better way? Last time inDesign was not cooperating and kept crashing even when keeping my books were 100 pages. It was just too much...

If there is another way to alphabetize the documents so they could all be in on file I would do that too!

Any ideas?

Thank you so much!

How to

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@Rose Damy

Do you want to index by the name of the linked file / ad?

Or there is something in each file that can be used for indexing? The best would be if you've placed a PDF and there is original INDD file available - I've done this way huge product catalogues.

If you place your ads as links to PDFs or images - you should easily "survive" 1500 links in one INDD file.

If you work on a PC - my ID-Tasker can do it any way you want it - analyse your INDD files and either extract names of the linked files - or open each linked file and pull some specific info.

ID-Tasker isn't free but i can give you access to the full version for some time for testing.

Then, if you like it - you don't have to buy it forever - you can buy a token for a few days when you need it - and run Task(s) you've crated last year.