Is it possible to reuse an index from a previous document in Publisher?

[bawilliamson]

I created a project that just got messed up as I was learning the basics of Affinity Publisher. So after I had learned from my mistakes I more carefully set up a brand-new document, then went to my old document, copied all the text and pasted into the new doc. Success!

Two questions:  (1) I now have at least a hundred old Index Markers from the old file that are still showing up in the text frame but are no longer integrated with the Index of the new doc. Is there any way to blend or merge that data; or (2) am I going to have to create a brand-new Index from scratch. If that is true, then how do I get rid of all of the non-functional Index Markers from the old text?

Thanks for your help!

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

It appears that Copy/Paste will copy over the Index Marks, but not the data associated with them. So I'm afraid you have a bunch of non-functional index marks. You can see them if you've activated Text > Show Special Characters, and you could look through your document and add new Index Marks for each one manually.

If you had used Document > Add Pages from File both the Index Marks and the associated data would have come along.

I think that there is probably a bug here. Either Copy/Paste should ignore the Index Marks and data completely, or they should copy all of it. When one of the Serif staff get to this topic they should be able to provide another opinion

[bawilliamson]

Walt, 

Thanks for your help! I had way too many Index Markers from the old document and too many newbie problems I had created for myself, so I just settled for getting the new document to work by (1) copying all the text I had inserted into the new document from the old doc that had all the useless Index Markers; (2) pasting the entire 150 pages of that text into BBEdit; and (3) copying that cleaned-up text back into the new Publisher doc. That process, of course, wiped out all of the Index Markers, but since I had first made copies of all the old Index pages, it's a simple matter now to recreate the Index all over again — knowing I won't make the same mistakes again. 

Learning how to operate a new piece of design software while trying to get a finished publication out the door is challenging, but as a long-time InDesign user I am thrilled to have discovered and switched over to Affinity Publisher!