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Question

How to display bookmarks as ranges in index

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
July 5, 2021
3 replies
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I created an index using Word and now I'd like to typeset my document using InDesign. I can place the Word document in InDesign and generate the index. When I do that, the standalone entries come out great, but the entries that are linked to bookmarks and show as page ranges in the Word index only show as the last page number from each range in InDesign.

For example, a bookmark that stretches from page 2 through 4 will list "2–4" in Word's index (great) and "4" in InDesign's index (not usable). I need it to show "2–4" in InDesign as well.

How do I get InDesign to show page ranges for bookmarks like Word does?

I'm marking this as a feature request in case this isn't a thing yet. (But I *really* hope it is.)

This topic has been closed for replies.

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Randy Hagan

Community Expert

Got you covered. I helped someone with this issue a while ago in a previous post. It took me a while to find it, but I think it'll help you a lot.

You can find out how to set page ranges in your index here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/index-pagereferences/m-p/11422249#M395445

Hope this helps,

Randy

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defaultrtwih5jdb17dAuthor

Participant

That's really cool but it seems to solve a different problem, namely how to "slurp" continuous page numbers into a single page range, like turning "1, 2, 3" into "1–3". That's not what I'm trying to do.

My problem is that InDesign won't recognize page ranges from bookmarks and only put the last (!) page from each bookmark in the index. So what I'm trying to do is to get InDesign to display "1–10" if my bookmark ranges from page through page 10. Currently it just shows "10".

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Randy Hagan

Community Expert

Maybe some of the scripting mavens around here can come up with a magic formula for you.

But if you want to do this yourself, the only way I know to do this is to place an index entry at the start of the page range, then set an entry for the range and delete the rest within that range.

Wish I had a better answer for you,

Randy

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Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

InDesign handles page ranges in a number of ways: for the next number of paragraphs, the next no. of pages, to the end of the section, to the end of the document, tto the next (named) style, and some more. But unfortunately InDesign doesn't use bookmarks (or any other type of marker) to mark the end of an index range (as Word does). And unfortunately InDesign doesn't convert Word's bookmark index range marker to something usable in InDesign. Your feature request joins a long and old queue.

You'll have to change the range index markers to any of InDesign's range formats. The only way that that could be automated is if you have a list with topic names and corresponding bookmark names.

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defaultrtwih5jdb17dAuthor

Participant

You'll have to change the range index markers to any of InDesign's range formats. The only way that that could be automated is if you have a list with topic names and corresponding bookmark names.

Hmm... I do have that information in Word's index. So it should be possible to automate it somehow.

Eric Dumas

Community Expert

Hi,

An 'Index' is looking for specific words to catalogue in the Topics/Subtopics you create. The words listed are on specific pages, I am not sure a range of pages applies there. Create an index in InDesign (adobe.com)

If you meant 'Table of Content' that would mean a chapter or section title listed (using their specific formatting) shows their corresponding page range. Create a table of contents in Adobe InDesign.

The TOC creates a list of locations where InDesign detects the formatted text, there are no markers to understand where it ends.

You can add section in your page numbering that might help, but since there are no 'markers' to indicate where the chapter ends, I am not sure it will help.

You can add this question in the Scripting forum to get help on generating a custom script.

Also you can add this idea to Adobe InDesign (uservoice.com)

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defaultrtwih5jdb17dAuthor

Participant

You wrote:

You can add section in your page numbering that might help

Can you please clarify what you mean by this.

As a more general answer, for what it's worth, I did mean an index, not a table of contents. Indexes often contain page ranges. I can see this in several books I own. If you write a book about medicine and it covers antibiotics from page 70 to 80, the index entry on antiobotics should say "70–80", not just "70", and definitely not just "80".

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