"Insert Index" inserts only one topic

[Rabari]

Working on a 300 + page project, with an index originating from the original Word file. Everything looks fairly normal in the layout with a lot of index marks, and an Index panel populated with a fair amount of topics. However, when i click the Insert index button, only one entry appears, and seemingly randomly from the middle of the topic list.

There are some potential problems in the index:

1. Many double entries, with the "copy" named the same, but in quotation marks.
2. Many entries begin with a backslash "/" to separate out a different kind of topic - could this be a problem?
3. Some entries were converted to subtopics because a colon ":" somewhere in the topic name had been changed to a forward slash "\" somewhere along the way. 

Additional question: I cannot find a way to delete a topic, or to merge similiar topics to one topic, by naming them the same way (like in ID).

[MikeTO]

I've never seen or heard of this behaviour when importing index marks from MS Word. Could you share a small sample of the file for testing?

Publisher should insert an index entry for each index reference - empty topics will not generate an entry like ID can optionally do.

There isn't a way to merge index topics in Publisher - you can edit an index reference and change its topic to another one which will leave the other topic empty, if it doesn't have any other index references. There isn't an option to delete empty topics but that's not hard to do. To delete a topic, select it in the panel and click the Delete icon (the trashcan). But I agree, renaming topics to merge them would be a great improvement.

I tested starting an index entry with forward and backward slashes and couldn't find a problem. However, if they imported this way, perhaps there's a hidden control character in one of those and you'll need to delete it. I realize it's hard to do that but perhaps start over and for each one that has a slash, click on it twice in the panel to rename it, and while all the text is highlighted, retype the text entirely - don't just delete the slash. That should get rid of any control characters that might not be visible.

I bet the colon is what caused the topic to become a subtopic. Publisher doesn't support this, but PageMaker and other apps used to allow you to use colons and semicolons for fancy features like specifying subtopics and multiple topics at once. It was a bit cryptic but it was a lot faster than the way ID and Publisher do it now. I hope someday an improved version of that old feature will be added to Publisher.

Check out the free PDF manual I've written for Publisher which includes a long section on the index feature - the link is below in my signature.

Cheers

[Rabari]

Thanks! I'll try your suggestions and definately will check out your manual!

I will also try to figure out a way to make a sample of the file, although I suspect that something in the total index is somehow the biggest part of the problem. 

[MikeTO]

I did some more tests and I found a bug with importing MS Word index marks that are page ranges or cross-references. Publisher doesn't support page range index references so I'm not entirely surprised, but it does support index cross-references. Regardless, it should remove the code snippet from the index topic name. For example, here's how you create a page range index entry in MS Word. Word uses a bookmark in conjunction with the index reference marker to create a page range.

Since Publisher doesn't support ranges, I would expect it to just use the page number of the marker which it does, but it fails to remove the bookmark name from the topic. For Serif, here's a test document.

index.docx

Word stores a page range index marker as:

{ XE "Topic name" \r "Bookmark name" }

When the topic is created in Publisher, it is named:

Topic name" \r "Bookmark name

The same happens with index cross-references. Fortunately these are easy to rename in Publisher, and are actually a good reminder that they'll no longer be page ranges. If you want a page range such as 55-57, you'd need to insert an index mark on each of the three pages and then use the "Group page ranges" option. It's not quite as easy as MS Word but it works. I hope that someday when Publisher does support dynamic page ranges, it does it more like InDesign than Microsoft Word. InDesign does it the way PageMaker used to do it which is more powerful.

However, I couldn't find any additional problems with inserting an index that had these sorts of index marks, there are no hidden control codes, so I'm not sure what happened with your document.

[Rabari]

Thanks again for the effort! The imported index shouldn't have page ranges or cross references. Just straight "first level" topics.

As I get to work on this project only in my spare time, I'm afraid I haven't had time to try any new approaches or to prepare a sample file. I'll get back as soon as possible

[Lee D]

Thanks @MikeTO for the file, I've logged it with the developers to see if the process can be improved.

[Rabari]

Turned out the imported word index topic marks ("flags") import after the indexed word. (see pic with E. Nordman exemple)

If I move the index mark before the indexed word (like on row 3), this entry outputs correctly from the index panel. Go figure. Now I'm trying to figure out a way to automate this move somehow.

[MikeTO]

24 minutes ago, Rabari said:

Turned out the imported word index topic marks ("flags") import after the indexed word. (see pic with E. Nordman exemple)

If I move the index mark before the indexed word (like on row 3), this entry outputs correctly from the index panel. Go figure. Now I'm trying to figure out a way to automate this move somehow.

If you select a text range such as "Christmas and New Year's" in Word before choosing Mark Entry, the index mark will be added after the text range. This isn't ideal "Christmas and" is on page 17 but "New Year's" broke onto page 18, the index would state 18 instead of 17. MS Word has a page range feature but that requires creating a book mark and perhaps you don't want a page range. The solution in Word for a index mark on a single page is to position the text cursor before the word you want to index rather than selecting the word or phrase.

Publisher works the opposite way and positions the index mark before the selected text range, which IMO is a more logical approach.

But once the index mark is inserted, it's just a marker and an index in Publisher will show whatever page the mark falls on. I tried testing what you reported, positioning index marks at the end of a paragraph immediately before the paragraph break. I tried it with multiple paragraphs and with ones immediately before the end of a frame. No matter what I tried it worked fine. So could you please share a test file that illustrates the problem?

Cheers

[Rabari]

Even more strangely - if I Import the file anew - the index seems to be correct, even though the index marks are after the indexed word…

I can now also see all the references when i choose "Show topics and references". These actually weren't there before… Only for the one instance which output correctly. Oh well - just 300 pages…

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "MS Word doc with page range index references aren't supported" (REF: AF-1618) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.5.0.2317".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.