Remove all indexing markers/hidden/special characters

[Sean5CF1]

Hi All

Started to rebuild a new index for the next edtition of a 500 page manual

I used the existing INDEX template and found it difficult and confusing to remove all the redundant markers etc

This worked a treat - cleaned everything with no ghost markers to be found

Step 1.

1. Open your whole book
2. click on find/change
3. under "find what" click on the @symbol
4. click on markers --> then index marker
5. leave change to: blank
6. under search, search "all documents"
7. Then "change all"

Step 2. (can you believe it?)

1. remove unused topics
2. from index menu check reference and book
3. highlight (click on) any indexed topic
4. go to top right menu and "remove unused topics"

Tah DAH - all index markers are deleted and your old index is clean ready to rebuild

Whew!! you're welcome 

All this SHOULD be an ID single click menu option. WHY?

• For all of us who rebuild indexes for the same book/manual/document
• requiring all old/dead/deleted (but not deleted) special or hidden characters
• but require all styles and indexing setup to remain intact

[Peter Kahrel · Accepted solution]

You can use this one-liner to remove all index markers and all topics:

app.documents.everyItem().indexes.everyItem().topics.everyItem().remove();

 With your method you don't remove cross-references, by the way.

[Sean5CF1]

Thanks Peter

What you've written there makes no sense to me, but if it works for you, good!

sean

[smp_4658]

Tried this today and it caused ID to crash. Can't get much out of the crash report other than ID is getting a null pointer reference ...

[smp_4658]

Actually, even trying to remove the topics by hand causes ID to crash.

Any suggestions? Not sure how to recover this ID file w/o the index?

[Peter Kahrel]

Does InDesign crash when you delete a particular topic? Another thought: can you export the document to IDML without ID crashing?

[smp_4658]

We haven't gone through the "delete individually and remember which one fails" (it takes a while: it's not in the first dozen).

But, yeah, exporting to IDML causes it to crash. 😞

[Peter Kahrel]

This problem has been reported before. Please go to https://indesign.uservoice.com and report the problem. Also please submit your document so that the engineers have something to work on.

[alexscott521]

This doesn't work for me in ID 2025. After deleting all of the index markers (there were only a few), each topic (there are hundreds, inherited from a previous book) still has a page icon with the letters "PN" next to it (in the References button). When you click on "Go to reference," nothing happens. When you generate the index, there are no page numbers next to the entries. But when you try to "Remove Unused Topics" from either the References or Topics button, nothing happens. Have to delete each topic one at a time.

[Peter Kahrel]

When you delete index markers the way Sean described (find index markers and replace with nothing) you remove the page references, not the topics. To remove topics, use that one-line script I showed. That will of course also remove any associated page references. Did you try that?

[alexscott521]

Sorry, I have no idea how to "use a script," not being a programmer. I assumed that "Remove Unused Topics" in the Index drop-down menu was supposed to remove unused topics. I'm open to using a script, but I would need instructions for how to do it. Thanks.

[Peter Kahrel]

1. Create a text file (using a plain-text editor) with just the one-liner and save it as delete-all-topics.jsx.

2. Open InDesign's Scripts panel (Window > Utilities > Scripts), right-click the User folder, select 'Open in Finder' (or Explorer). This opens the Scripts folder in your file manager.

3. Copy the jsx file to the Scripts Panel folder.

You'll see the script in the Scripts panel.

To run the script. double-click it.