Text Anchors

[Don34862646jbr5]

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.

[Eugene Tyson]

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

[Don34862646jbr5]

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.

[Eugene Tyson]

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.

[Don34862646jbr5]

This may be a situation of "be careful what you ask for."

The book I am doing requires two "lists," a table of cases and an index. Doing the table manually is easy but supremely teditous. I would just create a text anchor at every appearance of a case and then type up the table with all the cross-references. I'm hoping to avoid that.

I know the term GREP because I run Kubuntu in preference to Windows, but I'm not at all familiar with GREP in ID. You also mentioned custom scripts. I understand the concept and have done some programming, but I am far too new to ID to attempt it here. The manuscript is due in October, and I'm pretty sure the publisher meant 2025, not 2057.

The table is much more extensive than the index, and it struck me earlier today that it really is just a special case of an index. Accordingly, I could just mark each case as an index entry, and when I generate the index everything will be alphabetized and all the page numbers will be there. At least, I think that's right.

I may have thought of a work-around for the full-and-short name issue. Sometimes a case has such a distinctive name that just referring to the plaintiff or the defendant suffices. Then it's easy; I just use the shortened reference for all that case's index entries. But, for example, with a case like Brown v. Board of Education, that won't work. And if I've recently mentioned the case by its full name (say on the preceding page) then it's needlessly long to give the full name again, because 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). I'm working (sot to speak) on other work-arounds.

Then there's the matter of the actual index. I have read that ID only permits one index per book, and if that's true, I would rather do the table as an index and do the index by hand with text anchors and cross-references. But what would happen if I were to do the following:

1. Make an exact duplicate of the indb and all the indd files in another folder.

2. Set up the table of cases in the original copy using ID's index feature and generate the "index" (table).

3. Go to the copy and set up the real index using the index feature, and generate the index.

4. Copy the generated index from the book copy to the original.

In other words, is it possible to hoodwink ID, or would it then cancel my life? (My major in college was Creative Laziness.)

Thanks.

[Eugene Tyson · Accepted solution]

Ok I get it - thanks for the explanation and I had to re-read many times to fully understand your dilemma, I tend to ask for examples as often the full picture is not described or misunderstood, it's just me being over cautions. 

@Peter Kahrel is best placed to answer this query - I would feel. I've never used the Index feature in InDesign. Even though I've typeset many large technical manuals by hand - the index was always outsourced to professional indexers. 

Just my thoughts now and maybe it would work but again, just open thoughts on the issue with no practical balance considered here. 

What you described could be a very clever and creative way to think about it you’re basically trying to use the Index feature to do double-duty, and I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t work.

Yes, InDesign allows only one index per book, but the way you outlined it:

Duplicate the .indb and .indd files

Use one for generating the Table of Cases

Use the other for the standard Index

Then combine the two generated indexes manually into the final book

That seems doable. The generated indexes are just normal text frames once they’re created you can treat them like any other text. It’s a little manual but massively more efficient than creating 300 anchors and cross-references by hand.

You can also mark short references like “Brown” using the same index term as the full “Brown v. Board of Education”, assign the same index marker to both. In the Index panel, you can create a main entry and use “see also” or cross-references if needed.

As for the invisible text trick changing font size and colour to hide parts of the name, honestly, I’d avoid that. It’s a bit risky and might come back to haunt you in PDF export, reflow, or EPUB. I'm not sure how else you can go about this, maybe create multiple index entries for the same case using? Could be safer.

Also, agree with Peter’s answer text anchors don’t span ranges, they sit on a single character. So if you want anchors and want to reuse them, you might be better off scripting something later if the indexing approach doesn’t give you what you need.

If you get stuck or want to explore a GREP or script-based solution for tagging all your cases (like detecting “v.” patterns), let us know - as semi-automating the marking process could be very useful.

[Don34862646jbr5]

You can also mark short references like “Brown” using the same index term as the full “Brown v. Board of Education”, assign the same index marker to both. In the Index panel, you can create a main entry and use “see also” or cross-references if needed.

As for the invisible text trick changing font size and colour to hide parts of the name, honestly, I’d avoid that. It’s a bit risky and might come back to haunt you in PDF export, reflow, or EPUB. I'm not sure how else you can go about this, maybe create multiple index entries for the same case using? Could be safer.

This is actually the answer. I had not realized that I can use the same index marker for different pieces of text. Then the job is much easier, because I don't need all that folderol that I suggested in the second paragraph quoted above.

The generated indexes are just normal text frames once they’re created you can treat them like any other text. It’s a little manual but massively more efficient than creating 300 anchors and cross-references by hand.

Thanks for confirming that my crazy idea would actually work. I'm going to combine this with Peter's point about making a single index with two parts and then just moving the table-of-cases part to where it needs to be in the book. Between the two answers, problem solved. (There is the tiny matter of having now to make all the index markers, but compared with what it would have taken to do both jobs by hand, I'm way, way ahead.)

Thanks to all.

[Peter Kahrel]

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).

[Don34862646jbr5]

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.

[Peter Kahrel]

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 · Accepted solution]

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.