Indexing Issues in InDesign: Tags Misalignment in Long Documents

@peterv3761497

Adding each occurrence individually works fine in UI - only if you click ADD ALL it will go high-wire.

It's not about indexing words in Tables - the problem with shifted index markers is because of Tables. 

Using free script - or not free my ID-Tasker - with the fix I've found - will add index markers correctly. 

Hello, Abhishek Rao,

Thank you very much for contacting me!

I have not produced a screenshot yet, because I manually correct the dozens of cases that appear in each book so have none to show. I could easily simulate the problem but I am inundated with work and have not had time to do this.

An important point: I forgot to say that the problem arises when the ADD ALL option is chosen. There is no problem if each word is indexed individually.

And the problem only occurs if the word to be indexed appears at least 20 times in the book.

Even without a screenshot, the problem is easy to describe. When you index a word, InDesign places a little tag called an index marker next to the word. The index marker contains all the information needed for the index entry for that particular word. Its position is crucial for accurate indexing. If you choose the ADD ALL option, InDesign goes through the whole document, finding all the occurrences of the same word and inserting index markers. These markers should all go just before the word, but the bug I am talking about results in the markers being placed further and further away from the word – the distance from the word increases with the number of times the word is used in the book. The index markers end up so far from the word that it is sometimes difficult to work out which word they should go next to.

This is a very serious bug. I get the feeling it may have quite a straightforward cause and thus be easy to fix, but clearly Adobe is either unaware of it or is not prepared to spend any money on it. This enrages me: they force users to pay every month, which must bring in torrential quantities of money. I resent paying every month for extra features I do not want while a basic programming mistake like this remains uncorrected.

To answer your question: I have encountered this problem in many books over the past 10 years or so. In each case it is a document with between 300 and 400 pages.

If each chapter in the book is a separate story, the problem is much less acute, but most of the books I typeset need to be one long story.

I hope this helps.


Best wishes,
Peter

<Personal info removed by MOD>