long document with heading numbering - create index which is referencing paragraph heading numbers

[Arjen_Groeneveld]

Hello dear community. I'm working on company quality manuals. all paragraphs having their respective styles and heading paragraphs having numbering like 2.1.2.3. Right under each numbered heading paragraphs i have a line "Reference: ..." with (cross) reference to applicable rule making. I placed  all the rulemaking references first in an Excel. sheet. Then conferted that to word doc to have a list with Index words. Imported this list, generated the indexing and getting an Index in the document where the Page Numbers are referenced. So far so good. However, I need to have a reference to the numbered Heading paragraph instead the page number. Indesign doesn't not support this out of the box. I'm looking for a script that can do this.

[Peter Kahrel]

You're not likely to find one. It can be scripted, but it's not trivial.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

You're not likely to find one. It can be scripted, but it's not trivial.

By @Peter Kahrel

With my tool - it's piece of cake...

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Can you upload sample INDD file ?

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Before - with Variables:

After converting "Variables to Text"

But this would require two steps:

1) overriding TFs with Running Header on all pages

2) conversion of Variables to Text.

Of course, the whole process would have to be done on the copy of the file - and repeated every time you update your text - siginificantly.

[Peter Kahrel]

Well, Robert, converting paragraph numbers to text is a piece of cake whichever way you do it. The non-trivial bit is doing an index with those paragrapoh numbers as locators.

@FRIdNGE showed a script that does that, but I can't find the post. It wasn't too long ago.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

I was talking overall - but only when using my tool... 

Otherwise, with "pure" scripting - you need to do a lot of extra coding and consulting with the user... 

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

There is one more EXTREMELY BIG ADVANTAGE of my tool... and I'm using it internally already to speed up some of the "rules" ... but not advertising it too much... but maybe I should... 

My tool can be used to "prepare" list of objects to process - which list can be prepared much easier than through scripting - then, DoScript() can be executed as a "rule" / command, with a custom / external VBA / JS script...

And when you also add to the mix CONDITIONAL execution of other Tasks / DoScript() ...