Additional index options

[Ash]

Apps: Affinity Publisher
Platforms: All

On the Index panel, you'll find new options that provide increased control over the presentation of index entries.

In addition to being able to customise the words that precede cross-references within an index, five new options are available: After Topic, Between Items, Between Ranges, Before Refs, and After Ref.

Here's the Index panel, on which we've customised each separator's text.

In several cases, we've included spaces as well as visible characters. In fact, that's all the After Topic box contains.

Here's how our custom text looks in our publication's index.

Inserting special characters
Commonly used special characters are easily inserted into your custom separator text. On desktop, click the arrow at the left of the box. On iPad, tap the Insert icon at the top left of the on-screen keyboard.

Special characters can also be inserted using your operating system's feature for typing emoji and symbols, or by copying and pasting.

[MikeTO]

Thanks, this is great!! I've wanted some of these options.

A few issues:

1. The default value for Between Items is En Space (2002) + Zero Width Space (200B). The same field in 2.1 (then named Separator) started with a comma which seems like a good idea.
2. Clicking in an open document's index doesn't update the panel's options to the values for the index so updating your index may reset all of its options, which just happened to me. Also this makes it harder to tweak the values.
3. Clicking in any of the panel's text fields logs Set String Value in the History panel even though I haven't typed a character. Not a big deal on its own but combined with the panel not reflecting the current index's options means that clicking through the text fields for an existing index will change that index's options to the panel's values.
4. You can't tab between the text fields - pressing tab logs Set String Value in History but doesn't do anything.
5. Making any change to an option changes the displayed page to the page containing the last character of the index. Perhaps not a big deal while setting up an index that is just a few entries but if you're tweaking your book's long index while focusing on the most complex entries, you'll have to keep scrolling back up to see those entries.
6. Undoing changes to the checkboxes and text fields doesn't always update the panel. I haven't figured this out, it seems to do it sometimes but not always.

This is off topic but the only reason I played with this in detail was because I was surprised to see the Zero Width Space (200B) after the En Space in the Between Items field. En Space breaks in apps like Word and ID. I assumed it was breaking in Publisher so each time I've typed an en space I've formatted it as No Break which I realize now was pointless. Should en and em spaces be changed to break to match other apps? I personally prefer it the way it is now but maybe it would be better to match the formatting of other apps. [EDIT: the additional spaces in ID are non-breaking, my mistake]

Edited July 11, 2023 by MikeTO
correction, last paragraph

[A_B_C]

This is fantastic! Everything is coming together! 😀

[Jon P]

Hi @MikeTO,

I've logged 2,3 & 4. Am struggling to see what you mean by 5 if you don't mind posting a video to demonstrate, and will poke around 6 and see if I can reproduce anything, for now it seems to be undo'ing correctly

[UweN]

Hi,

any chance to get a solution regarding this topic in the current 2.2 development path?

regards, Uwe

 

[Ash]

3 hours ago, UweN said:

any chance to get a solution regarding this topic in the current 2.2 development path?

I'm afraid won't be in 2.2, but we'll see what we can do in a future update.

[UweN]

thank you, some light at the end of the tunnel

Regards, Uwe

[MikeTO]

9 hours ago, Jon P said:

Hi @MikeTO,

I've logged 2,3 & 4. Am struggling to see what you mean by 5 if you don't mind posting a video to demonstrate, and will poke around 6 and see if I can reproduce anything, for now it seems to be undo'ing correctly

Thanks Jon. Here's a screen recording and test doc for #5. The index needs to span multiple pages so I've simulated that for this test doc with three tiny linked frames. Also a smaller screen may be helpful. Updating the index changes the active spread from 1 to 2-3.

index update.afpub

 

 

[Barry Newman]

I'll probably wait to use this until after it has matured a bit after a few releases with fixes, but for me it's useful news along with cross references.

Best

Barry

[Jon P]

Thanks @MikeTO, It may be by design since the frames are linked and it's jumping you to the end of the frame it's just updated, but I've logged it

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Jon P said:

Thanks @MikeTO, It may be by design since the frames are linked and it's jumping you to the end of the frame it's just updated, but I've logged it

Thanks. It does seem like it's by design but it's just inconvenient when trying to tweak the design of your index. I was playing with the separators for multiple index entries and the best index topic to test it on started with C, but every time I tweaked the separators I ended up at Z. It's a very minor and trivial thing so not important.

[MikeTO]

Very minor stuff.

The new "After References" field defaults to a space unless I've messed up my defaults again. I suggest this be blank, adding a space after the last cross reference doesn't do anything.

The See Also text defaults to "See Also" but I believe "See also" is more common.

The new "Before References" field would more accurately be named "Before Cross-references" since a page number is a reference but that won't fit. Would "Before See/Also" fit?