Multiple Indexes

[philipt18]

I'd love to be able to output multiple indexes in Publisher. For example, a general index, an index of Places, and index of People, etc. The book I'm working on is very complicated, and I'd love to be able to separate out a few indexes, and introduce how they work. Another example is that I'm defining many words used in the book. I'd like to separate that out into a different index, a kind of lexicon for the book. You could keep the current UI for indexing, just add the ability to tag specific Index items as separate indexes (i.e. have a Places index item, and tag that, and all the sub-items of Places can be placed into a separate generated index. Maybe separate out each index into separate sections within the Index tab, but allow dragging between them.

[MikeTO]

This has been requested many times but the more requests the better, multiple indices are sorely needed. In the meantime, I've written instructions for how to hack the index feature to create multiple indices. The workaround has some limitations but it works fine. Please see the "Creating multiple indices" section of the free Publisher manual I've shared in this forum - the link is in my signature below.

There is no way to create a definitions or glossary in Publisher. It's a feature missing from MS Word and InDesign, too, although MS Word does have its table of authorities feature. You could manually create the glossary as you go along and then when you're done laying out your book search for each term using Find and Replace and link the term to the glossary entry.

Good luck.

[philipt18]

As I'm getting close to finalizing my book, I've started working on multiple indexes. I noticed that after I moved a section out of the index, it got auto-updated back into place. I don't even see a setting for auto-updating the index. Where do I shut that off?

[MikeTO]

33 minutes ago, philipt18 said:

As I'm getting close to finalizing my book, I've started working on multiple indexes. I noticed that after I moved a section out of the index, it got auto-updated back into place. I don't even see a setting for auto-updating the index. Where do I shut that off?

You can't shut it off. There are certain actions that update the index immediately. For example, if you add a bunch of index marks the index will not update, but if you rename an index topic, the index will update and those index marks you previously added will appear. I find this confusing, I think it should either always update automatically or never update automatically.

If you're creating multiple indices, the best suggestion I can offer is to generate the index in a hidden text frame. Just add a page in a non-printing section at the end of the document. Then copy and paste the index text from the hidden frame and paste it where you want it. When Publisher updates the index, it will update the real one in the hidden frame while the copy you pasted is just plain text and will remain static.

Cheers