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gregorys84937500
Participating Frequently
May 24, 2018
Question

CC 2018 editing with Word & Grammarly, which destroys indexing

  • May 24, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 2811 views

I have a book of 660 pages with a long index (14 pages) that I thought was finished.  A friend recommended Grammarly, which I tested, and it caught a # of tiny mistakes & issues like run-on sentences, extraneous words, etc.  I wish I had known about it before creating my index in Word and importing into InDesign (ID) (and before then massively re-working the whole book while in ID).  Thus I need to put all the text through Grammarly (Premium version), but it doesn't support ID.

I can copy & paste the text from an .indd file directly into Grammarly, make the corrections there, and then duplicate them in the original .indd file.  Very time consuming (mostly to rethink and rewrite run-on sentences).  Much faster to copy & paste into a new Word doc and then import the whole Word doc into Grammarly.  This process keeps all the formatting (and footnotes) and allows one to blaze through the corrections, and then export the new file into a new Word doc, which I then Place into my ID template to recreate the .indd file, but now much more elegant.

The problem is that Grammarly blows away the invisible index codes and so when I re-generate the Index with the elegant file as part of the whole .indb file, I have lost the indexing for that document (= one chapter).

Given the test on 15 pages, I figure it would take me 200 hours to polish the 660 pages.  If I make use of Word docs and then build new .indd files, I estimate about 50 hours, plus another 20 hours or so for manually rebuilding the index from scratch.  70 hours versus 200.

Any easier option?  I see a plugin that was in beta, but I gather learning it and then going through all the words, etc. might take me 20 hours also.

Best, Greg  P.S.  I'll put in a new feature request for Grammarly to support ID, but even if Grammarly is amenable, it would take months, I bet...

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    1 reply

    BobLevine
    Community Expert
    BobLevineCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 24, 2018

    Ideally, you'd be doing writing and editing in Word and once that's done, place it into InDesign and do the indexing.

    I don't have anything more for you except the feature request to Grammarly.

    G
    gregorys84937500Author
    Participating Frequently
    May 24, 2018

    Thanks, Bob.  I had, and have, the feeling I'll have to re-do the indexing if I'm going to use Grammarly.  For the future, I'll always do the Grammarly first, in Word.  However, this is the 2nd edition of a book that was done (too quickly) 2.5 years ago, and I only discovered Grammarly a few weeks ago, after I had input the 660 pages and then re-edited the whole thing very carefully in ID. 

    So unless someone else has a "magical" solution, I'll just bite the bullet.

    Regards, Greg

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