Indexing book: how to have all terms of book appear even if only one document is open?

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
August 20, 2025
2 replies
270 views

I am working on indexing a >1,000 page, 18 document book. I would like to have ALL index terms from all documents in the Index pallette regardless of which/how-many document(s) are open. Currently, only the index terms from the open documents appear in the index pallette. How can I get that done? The book container .indb is open.

Having all >1000 pages (with LOADS of large illustrations) open makes ID slow and crashy (iMac 18 core 64 GB RAM: not a hardware limitation). Having all terms available is important for consistency and to be able to search for existing index entries.

Thanks for letting me know.

P

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

It's not possible. The Index panel shows only the cross- and page references in open documents. To do consistency checks you'll have to generate the index from time to time.

But 1,000+ pages in 18 documents isn't that outrageous, InDesign easily handles that in my experience. Are the illustrations you mention embedded? Do you use (a lot of) GREP styles? Anything else that slows down InDesign and/or makes it crash?

P.

D

Daniel GeigerAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks Peter. Sort of looked that way, just wondered whether I missed something. Have done a couple of rounds of Index generation & consistency checks, just wondered whether there is something more straightforward than brute force.

The >600 images (.tifs) are linked, not embedded. I have about 12-15 paragraph and text styles, and several use multiple GREP specifications [species names in italics, figure caption ABCs in bold, certain (sub)headings in bold or bold italics: super helpful and time saver]. Page and cross references, and all the figure numbering/referencing is handled dynamically by VirginiaSystems plug ins. ID-native page referencing makes ID unusable, even with just a dozen page refs. (I now have about 200 of those): 1-2 minutes for any keystroke to take effect.

Indexing works well [except caveat], ID-TOC only runs first document, another headscratcher. So will use VS TOC generator.

P

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

If I were you I'd convert those GREP styles to local styles. In documents with long stories, GREP styles usually cause delays. You can use a script to do that:

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/grep-styles-to-local-styles.html

Saving your documents using Save As reduces their size lot (by deleting the document's undo history), which tends to make things smoother. And disable preflight, hide all panels -- the accumulation of all these things make a difference.

jmendesign

Inspiring

Hi.
in the book panel select all the documents. No need to open them.

D

Daniel GeigerAuthor

Inspiring

Sorry, does not work, or there is more to it. Tried it with Literature Cited chapter (>1K references, which has essentially no indexed words) and index panel is empty. Yes, the book is synchronized.

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