Collaboration via DropBox

Okay. That helps a lot. At least on my end.

On yours, it's going to be a bit challenging. But not insurmountable.

The hardest part will be swallowing hard and having your colleague eliminate all the entries in your current index. And restarting from scratch — but not until the book is completely done. It stinks, but it's the only way to be sure. The issue stems from the fact that index entries are effectively inscrutable once they're done. The indexing process seems to go around in circles, but there's no closed loop.

When your colleague enters an index entry into an InDesign layout, it's invisible. There's an invisible character placed in the layout — place an index entry at the start of a word you've indexed, then hit your back cursor and you'll see you have to hit the key twice to get to the end of the previous word. It's there, but the index entry is entirely invisible in your layout.

You can see the entry, though, if you go to InDesign's Story Editor. You can see there's an index entry there. It shows up as a horizontal rectangle with a pattern in the middle. But you can't read what that entry is from there. The more complex the index, the more this is an issue; if you've indexed both Chrysanthemum and Flowers, Chrysanthemum you'll see two index entry boxes there, but you won't be able to tell which one is which.

To see what an index entry is, you'll have to open the Index panel and navigate your way to where it is in the topics, open it, and see what page it's on. But it doesn't highlight the entry in the Story Editor, and it'll still be invisible on the layout. Double-clicking the page reference to the topic opens the Page Reference Options dialog box, which lets you edit what text will appear for the entry when you generate the index, but doesn't let you see where it's located within the page or move it.

So as I said, it seems like everything's running in the right circles. But there's no continuous loop. Creating index entries will let you create a new index reference, but it can't let you see see which one is which. You can see the entries with InDesign's Story Editor, but you can't see what each entry actually is. Searching and re-entering the topics list will fix where there weren't entries before, but put double-entries where they already are.

If your copy of the files have no index entries, have your colleague work with your version of the files. It's got the current copy and is the latest version of the book. Your colleague will have only lost the time spent generating the index with an incomplete version of the book. If your copy of the files does have index entries already, you should both still work with your copy. But you should delete all the existing entries and start over from scratch when the book is completed. It's a tedious process, but indexing is best done when everything else for the book is completed.

It's a painful lesson, but having to do it over again to get things right is negative reinforcement that'll convince you all that you only want to do this once in the future.

Sorry. Wish I had better news. But I'd rather tell you the truth than lie to you,

Randy

The only way to be sure you're getting correct results is to delete the existing index