Adding Sort By field to the Insert Marker dialog

[philipt18]

When inserting an index marker in Publisher, it would be helpful if the Sort By field was present in Insert Marker dialog. Right now, when inserting a name, for example, I need to add the marker, then find the marker, edit it, and then add the last name to the Sort By field to get it to sort properly. It would save a lot of time if this was simply in the initial Insert Marker dialog. I don't know why the Insert Marker and Edit Marker dialogs are actually different. On a related note, why is Style Override in the Insert Marker dialog, but not in the Edit Marker dialog? Why not just have all four fields (name, parent, sort by and style override) in the same dialog?

[MikeTO]

I agree with you but I think you're mixing up topics and references. A topic can have multiple references.

There are two "Add" type dialogs:

• Add Index Topic: this creates a topic without adding any references (markers). It includes Sort By.
• Insert Topic Reference: this creates a reference to a topic and if the topic doesn't exist it creates it. It doesn't include Sort By. I believe Serif omitted Sort By because if you've previously created the topic then you can't create a second reference to it with a difference Sort By value. I think Serif could do this though. They could either disable Sort By if you enter the name of an existing topic, or they could set Sort By to match the existing topic's value, and if you change it in this dialog then it could be changed for the topic. I think this is a good feature request.

There is only one "Edit" type dialog:

• Edit Index Topic: this is equivalent to Add Index Topic.
• There is no "Edit Reference" dialog and this is missing. There's no way to edit an index reference so you can't change the Style Override value which is a reference-level attribute. The only workaround is to delete the reference and add it back with a different Style Override value, which isn't great. This has been requested before and it also a good feature request.

I've documented all of these index features in the free Publisher manual I've shared in this forum. The link is in my signature.

Cheers

[philipt18]

I see the problem, that when I add a reference that is for a new topic, it doesn't yet know that it's a new topic. Then my suggestion is that when adding a new reference, it should still offer the Sort By field, but grey it out if it's not a new topic. Publisher obviously knows when it's a new topic, as it needs to create a new topic if it doesn't already exist for the reference, so if the reference is for a new topic, it un-greys the Sort By field. Something along those lines. The way it works now it's a lot of extra work.