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Don34862646jbr5
Inspiring
June 21, 2025
Answered

Text Anchors

  • June 21, 2025
  • 4 replies
  • 738 views

Is it permissible in ID for text anchors to overlap? For example, if I have a piece of text that reads Brown v. Board of Education, can "Brown" be a text anchor and "Brown v. Board of Education" be another, or will that mess ID up.

 

Thanks.

Correct answer Peter Kahrel

On reflection (and after reading your latest post, which I could have done earlier), it's not that terrible. It's just that the projects I worked on were for automated workflows that had to be scripted, and I am prejudiced towards scripts.

 

Here's what you can do (essentially summarises what I wrote earlier)

- Mark up your normal index in the usual way.

- Mark up the table of cases and prefix the case entries with some symbol

- Generate the index

- Split the index into the table of cases and the index.

 

You don't really want to copy the book and do the index in one version and the table in another one. Any change you make you'll have to do twice. It'll be a nightmare.

 

> if I just say Brown, no one will misunderstand. One possible solution is to type out the full name, but make everything after Brown invisible (no color) and only .1 pt. That might work. (It might not).

 

Not sure I follow this. So you have two (or more) instances of Brown v. Board of Education in the text. Which instance(s) should be shortened, the second (and any following)? Anyway, I agree with Eugene that you want to avoid that trick as much as possible. 

 

Marking up the cases should be ok, especially if you get your head around GREP to some extent. There are a lot of resources on the web for GREP.

4 replies

Peter Kahrel
Community Expert
Peter KahrelCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
June 23, 2025

On reflection (and after reading your latest post, which I could have done earlier), it's not that terrible. It's just that the projects I worked on were for automated workflows that had to be scripted, and I am prejudiced towards scripts.

 

Here's what you can do (essentially summarises what I wrote earlier)

- Mark up your normal index in the usual way.

- Mark up the table of cases and prefix the case entries with some symbol

- Generate the index

- Split the index into the table of cases and the index.

 

You don't really want to copy the book and do the index in one version and the table in another one. Any change you make you'll have to do twice. It'll be a nightmare.

 

> if I just say Brown, no one will misunderstand. One possible solution is to type out the full name, but make everything after Brown invisible (no color) and only .1 pt. That might work. (It might not).

 

Not sure I follow this. So you have two (or more) instances of Brown v. Board of Education in the text. Which instance(s) should be shortened, the second (and any following)? Anyway, I agree with Eugene that you want to avoid that trick as much as possible. 

 

Marking up the cases should be ok, especially if you get your head around GREP to some extent. There are a lot of resources on the web for GREP.

Peter Kahrel
Community Expert
Peter KahrelCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 23, 2025

It's true that an InDesign document can have just one index, but you can get around that. For instance, mark up the index as normal, then mark up the table of cases as a single topic in the index and split it off after generating it. Or prefix all table-of-cases entries with a certain symbol, then extract it after generating it (and remove that symbol). That's in a single document. In a book  (indb) you could use Eugene's suggestion of doing the index and the tables in separate documents.

 

In this way you can create other tables as well. I've used this method in several legal texts to do tables of cases, authority, and citations, and an index. Using text anchors isn't really an option, much too cumbersome.

 

InDesign's index is very limited, but you can do a lot with scripting (as Eugene mentioned) so that it becomes even useful. See https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/lists_indexes.html and https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/index-fixes.html for examples. See also https://www.kerntiff.co.uk/products-4-indesign/indexutilities for various index scripts.

 

You say that you started using InDesign only recently and don't know (yet) how to script. Your options are to do the job manually -- which, as you said, is very tedious -- or have a script written for you. It's not trivial so be prepared to pay a fee.

    Peter Kahrel
    Community Expert
    Peter KahrelCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 22, 2025

    Text anchors are single characters (as you can see in the story editor) underlyingly, their names are enclosed, so to speak, inside them. Text anchors therefore don't apply to a range of text, but to a single character.

     

    So yes, you can have those two text anchors, they'll sit next to each other (probably).

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    Don34862646jbr5Author
    Inspiring
    June 22, 2025

    Peter, you may have answered a question that I hadn't asked yet, but it's one that I have. I've been wondering whether it's possible to delete text anchors individually. I know there's a command for deleting all unused anchors, but some of the ones I want to get rid of are still destinations. If I can see them in Story Editor, then I can delete them. I realize that this will generate some errors (similar to Word's "Error. Reference not found), but there are not many that I need to dump, and I can deal with the error messages individually. I am grateful for your pointing this option out.

    E
    Community Expert
    Eugene TysonCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 22, 2025

    Not sure what you mean - can you provide an example of what you're trying to do. 

    D
    Don34862646jbr5Author
    Inspiring
    June 22, 2025

    Eugene,

    You're not sure what I mean because I asked the question in a consummately foolish way. I need to make a table of cases for the book I'm writing. Ordinarily, one refers to a case the first time by its full title, but after that by some shortened version. The table of cases needs to pick up each mention of the case, whether by full or shortened name. I'm going to rethink the question, and I am sorry to have wasted your time.

    E
    Community Expert
    Eugene TysonCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 22, 2025

    Not a waste of time at all! Once you've had a chance to rethink how you'd like to approach it, feel free to post again or add to this thread.

     

    What you're describing sounds like a very interesting use case, especially for legal texts with varying citation formats. There might be a workaround depending on how you're building the Table of Cases whether it's manually, using GREP, cross-references or custom scripts.

     

    Happy to help when you're ready.

     

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