Finding New Page Numbers for an Old Index

[gplumblee]

I have recreated an old family history book with Indesign and have put off the index until the end. My great uncle wrote a very detailed 30-page index for the 1982 printing of this 250-page book. The new layout does not reflect his page numbers, mainly because I put footnotes on the relevant pages instead of at the end of each chapter, but also because new generations have been added to the book.

I have all the text in for the index—minus the old page numbers—and want to know what my most efficient approach would be for moving forward with referencing each item to their corresponding page(s). There are close to 3,000 entries!

[TᴀW · Accepted solution]

If it's a very simple index, where each entry literally contains the exact text that appears on the page of the book (e.g. all instances of Beethoven), then you could rebuild the index with InDesign's indexing feature.

But if it's a proper index, with descriptive text (Beethoven, Sonatas: 1, 2, 3; Symphonies: 4, 5, 6 etc.) it's going to have to be done by hand I'm afraid.

[FRIdNGE · Accepted solution]

Not cool but! …

You could begin by collecting the contents of the old index and ["Salagadou, la menchikabou, la Bibidi Bobidi Bou!" (Cinderella)] highlighting all the occurences in the doc! After having isolated the good ones, remove the other bad ones ["Bibidi Babidi, Bibidi Babidi, Bibidi Bobidi Bou!" (idem)] and build/generate the index!

All that with just a few magic wands!  😉

(^/)  The Jedi