How I generate index markers using Applescript and tagged text!

Well, I did it. My Applescript script is running! It's knocking out pages like gangbusters from data that came from the customer as a 50-column spreadsheet and about 1300 rows.

It's an uncommon pleasure to sit and watch those pages build, pocketa, pocketa, pocketa.

The customer will be editing the native inDesign pages using inCopy. So now I'm going to have to write a script to harvest the edits back into the database. I can't parse it field for field, as there are a number of text concatenations throughout. But I will export the respective text frames in inDesign tagged text format and then storing those in their respective document fields for each record in the database. This will enable me to both preserve the edits and to re-generate the pages in case there are any record deletions and/or additions. Where the edit text files exist, I'll simply have Applescript place them back into the respective text frames, thereby preserving any text formatting.

It has been a long-time dream of mine to be able to do this kind of work. It's one important type of work at which computers excel.

This script and versions of it for other similar jobs will make us 100 times more productive and open up new markets for us.

I'm grateful to Apple and Adobe for keep this functionality working welll in their software tools.

A note on this:

Daniel Swanson wrote: I've tried various js scripts which do an OK job, but they don't make the actual native markers. This means you have to wait until the book (consistiing of multiple ID files) is complete (so that all the page numbers have been established) to generate the index.

These scripts typically search for words and immediately write out the page numbers they are found on -- one shot indexing.

The solution is to add both the topic and its page reference to the current document's index:

if (app.activeDocument.indexes.length == 0)
    app.activeDocument.indexes.add();
app.activeDocument.indexes[0].topics.add(app.selection[0].contents).pageReferences.add(app.selection[0]);

The first lines only make sure there is an index to add to (per default, a new document has none).

The last line adds a selected word to the index (it must be a plain text string, hence the use of its 'contents'), and then adds a reference to the selection in the text itself.

Adding the same word a second time will for a change (quite untypically for ID's Scripting) not result in an error but simply add another page reference to the existing one.

When doing this in a loop: remember to work backwards, because the index marker itself gets inserted into the running text, and that will throw off your text indices.

I do similar projects using a FileMaker database to generate tagged text files for the people pages. The corresponding alphabetical index is generated from the database as well, because the lastname, firstname format is another field in the database.