Indexing in Publisher 2

[Nuthatch]

I am preparing a booklet with four chapters. The first is standard 'front matter', the second and third are structured technical text, and the fourth is for the index. 

I spent a day creating the index before realising that the '+' icon in the index panel enables one to add a topic without an attached page number, so it can be used as a parent topic only. This was useful in making the index more easy to navigate. However, I discovered to my cost that this causes the application to freeze, either immediately or very soon after. I have tried the same manoeuvre several times, with similar results each time - forcing a Force Quit. 

The same problem does not seem to arise when adding sub-topics to existing topics when 'marking' text. But then the main topic has a page number of its own, which I don't always want and will need to edit out of the index page after each update. 

Is this a bug or am I missing something obvious here?

How is the data in the Index panel saved? Is it within the Book? Or is it recreated from text marks in chapter documents when the book is loaded? Does clicking 'Save', save Book, Chapter/documents and index all in one go??  Somehow my TimeMachine backup of a day's worth of indexing contained only a handful of index marks and the corresponding data in the Index panel. So something went wrong with saving the index too 😐.

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, Nuthatch said:

How is the data in the Index panel saved? Is it within the Book? Or is it recreated from text marks in chapter documents when the book is loaded? Does clicking 'Save', save Book, Chapter/documents and index all in one go??  Somehow my TimeMachine backup of a day's worth of indexing contained only a handful of index marks and the corresponding data in the Index panel. So something went wrong with saving the index too 😐.

If you mean "Book" in the technical term used in Publisher 2 (e.g., set up via the Books panel) then my understanding (which may be flawed or incomplete) is that:

1. Each Chapter has an independent set of Index Marks and other Index data.
2. Clicking Save (in the File menu) saves the only document tab (chapter) that you're currently working in. If you want to save the Book, you use the burger menu (panel options) in the Books panel.
3. When you create or update the index in a Text Frame, within a Chapter file, with the Book open, magic happens and the index info from all the chapter files is combined.

[MikeTO]

Each chapter file has only whatever index topics and markers were created in it - there isn't a master set for the whole book.

When you insert the index into your last chapter Publisher pulls all of those topics and markers to generate the index which is stored in that chapter but that chapter may otherwise have a blank index panel with no topics or markers.

I think the freezes you're experiencing are issues with synchronizing books. Hopefully those are fixed in the first update but for now it's safer to work on one chapter at a time.

36 minutes ago, Nuthatch said:

The same problem does not seem to arise when adding sub-topics to existing topics when 'marking' text. But then the main topic has a page number of its own, which I don't always want and will need to edit out of the index page after each update. 

I think you've inserted the marker incorrectly. Here's an example document that shows how to create a topic without a page number next to it.

index test.afpub

Now if you were to add another fruit or vegetable to this test document:

Insert a marker for Potatoes on its own:

Insert a marker for Potatoes under Vegetables - Vegetables will not have a page number beside it unless you insert a marker for Vegetables itself:

 

[Nuthatch]

Thank you Walt. 
Yes, I am using the term 'Book' as Publisher's Help uses it. 
I have reached the same conclusions as your 1, 2 & 3. If you are correct, then saving the Book does not save the data in the Index panel. The latter it is recreated at each launch of Publisher 2, an indexed Book, and its index-marked Chapter/Documents. 
Saving the Book afresh is thus only required after adding or deleting chapters??

Do you have any experience of using the '+' icon in the Index panel. 

[Nuthatch]

Thank you MikeTO; and especially for taking the trouble to create a demo. 

Your explanation for how to create a main topic without a page number works a treat and resolves my problem. I can now wait happily until the '+' problem is resolved. 

Thank you both (Walt and MikeTO) for your speedy and helpful responses. 

[walt.farrell]

25 minutes ago, Nuthatch said:

Saving the Book afresh is thus only required after adding or deleting chapters??

I think that is not correct. For example, if you add pages to a chapter file that can affect the complete book, I think, and can certainly affect the Book file itself. I would specifically save the Book whenever I've made changes to the chapters, as part of the Save process for the chapter(s) I've been working on.

[Nuthatch]

Righto Walt. I see your point and I shall follow your advice to be on the safe side. 
Indeed, I think you must be correct because I have just saved and closed each Chapter, and then moved to close the Book. A dialog box pops up alerting me to save the Book because I have made changes to it, despite the fact that I have not added or deleted a Chapter.
I am a little surprised by this because the only changes have been to a chapter, but perhaps this relates to the 'synchronising' MikeTO mentions.  
I am also surprised that Save Book does not appear in the File menu (with a key shortcut). The hamburger in the Books panel is not an obvious goto for saving; but at least the warning dialog box is a useful reminder. 

[TheOtherRoland]

I had Pub v2 regularly crashing while working on a 20 chapter book and trying to add an index topic. Not a marker in a document; just a topic without a reference link.

The way that I solved this issue was by removing the index text from the text field itself and then adding the topics. After that, I used the "insert index" command to put a new index in place. Clearly something is wonky, but not a terminal joy killer. This is on a Mac, Monterey Intel.

The Index issue that MikeTO brought up is haunting me too ie. no master index for the book. No way to search 20 chapters at once for a topic when they are split into separate docs. Ugh. I used one doc. in a previous book. Much easier to deal with, but makes the book feature seem kind of useless.

[MikeTO]

3 minutes ago, TheOtherRoland said:

The Index issue about the master set of index topics that MikeTO brought up is haunting me too. No way to search 20 chapters at once when split into separate docs.

That's true, the Index panel's Find in Document feature does just that, it finds in the current document so indexing by topic across multiple chapters wouldn't be effective. Perhaps a future version of Publisher will allow us to Find in Book.

[TheOtherRoland]

In the meantime, it looks like I have some merging to do.

[Kabeljauws]

Good morning,

I am creating a book with six chapters and an index. I started creating index marks in one of the chapters, but two days in a row after opening the chapter I find that index marks are missing. I even think that it's at random. After reading the above I think it is a good solution to handle the chapters as a stand alone file and using the book option at the end of the process, after all the chapters have been indexmarked. Or did I do something terribly wrong that caused the loss of the marks and is it easy to solve?

[MikeTO]

5 hours ago, Kabeljauws said:

I am creating a book with six chapters and an index. I started creating index marks in one of the chapters, but two days in a row after opening the chapter I find that index marks are missing. I even think that it's at random. After reading the above I think it is a good solution to handle the chapters as a stand alone file and using the book option at the end of the process, after all the chapters have been indexmarked. Or did I do something terribly wrong that caused the loss of the marks and is it easy to solve?

There are enough reports of index marks disappearing from Chapter files now that it's starting to sound like there is a problem with this. The descriptions aren't detailed enough to repeat the issue on demand yet so it's probably going to be a difficult one to figure out.

I suggest in the meantime to back up your chapter files frequently. The Book file isn't as important because you can rebuild it in a few minutes but back it up anyway. If you lose your index marks in one or more chapters, delete everything and move your backup to the original location. You will probably have to relink the chapter files when opening the backup Book.

I also suggest asking yourself if you really need to use the Books feature - most of the Books I've seen people describe here could be accomplished in a single document file. Unless you have just 8GB of memory or thousands of high resolution images, it's unlikely that you really need to use the Books feature. If you merge your Chapter files together you won't have any problems with indexing.

[Kabeljauws]

Thank you, MikeTO!

I threw the book away earlier today and opened one chapter. I saved it with a different name and started to place the index marks again. In the end I saved it, closed it and opened it a few hours later. The file then opened, but the Index panel remained empty... for a few seconds, then it got filled with all the index marks 😀

I will do what you suggested: put everything in one file. Is there a maximum to that? Being almost ready, the book contains just over 1 Gb of space (Affinity-files and images, which I have linked). That shouldn't be a problem, I guess with 40Gb of memory.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Kabeljauws said:

I will do what you suggested: put everything in one file. Is there a maximum to that? Being almost ready, the book contains just over 1 Gb of space (Affinity-files and images, which I have linked). That shouldn't be a problem, I guess with 40Gb of memory.

If you link your images instead of embedding them, your actual afpub document will be tiny. Even if you have over 1 GB of images, the afpub file will likely be 5-20 MB as long as the images are linked.

These Book features were necessary in the 1990s and even the 2000s when RAM was limited. It's hard to create a document that will be unworkable in Affinity if you have 16 GB of RAM. There are three things that can cause performance issues:

1. The number of pages. Publisher doesn't truly limit us on the number of pages but if you were to add 50,000+ pages to your document, you might find that Publisher quickly becomes unusable. This isn't an issue in the real world.
2. The length of each story (the text in a series of linked text frames). Flowing text is one of the most computationally challenging features of a page layout app so the more text you add to a story, the longer each change to text in that story will take. I highly recommend creating each chapter as a separate story in your combined document - don't link the last frame in chapter 1 to the first frame in chapter 2.
3. The number of inline images. Unless you're creating a book with lots of little icons, you'll be unlikely to run into this, but if you insert hundreds of inline images into a story, Publisher will start to slow down. I have this issue with my Publisher manual, there are so many tiny little icons scattered throughout the text that in certain circumstances, typing a single character can take 15 seconds to render on my M1 Pro. This is only under certain conditions but I run into this every day when I work on that manual. Breaking each chapter story up into multiple stories is the work around for this but I haven't done that yet.

With a normal book and not an overly-complicated software manual like I've created, you should expect no issues with creating your book as a single document.

Good luck