Improving Indexing

[philipt18]

I'm currently working to build out the index on a 600+ page book. As I went through the book I added markers, but now I need to go through and double-check that I've gotten everything right. It would really helpful if there were a few tools to help the indexing process itself.

For example, it would be really cool if when looking at the Index panel, you could click a button and have it fill in locations in red that it thinks might also be items to index. In other words, your index items look like they normally do, but it adds in other items in red (matching the text the others in the Index topic match) and let you click on them to go to the correct page, review it, and then click a checkmark to make it a real item in the index, or click an x to remove it.

This sort of exists now, where you can right click on a topic and select 'Find in Document' and then click a checkbox if you want to add it as an item. That's okay, but requires searching each topic, going through the search results, and then returning to the main Index page to search again. At the very least, it would be helpful if these results showed page numbers, so you know immediately if items are on the same page, and can be skipped (since they won't effect the outputted index).

[MikeTO]

I think this is a great idea although I wouldn't want it on by default unless index ranges were added, too.

For example, if I index "apples" and the book mentions apples on pages 17-19 but I just want to index the start of that topic on page 17, this feature would flag more mentions of apples on pages 18 and 19. Each time I enabled the feature it would flag pages 18 and 19 even though I'm never going to want to index them and I'd probably have to think about it each time I used the feature because they'd be highlighted in the panel and I wouldn't remember that 18 and 19 were a continuation. For a long book this might be a feature I'd use just once instead of leaving it on.

If Publisher had index ranges (index from the marker to the next style change, next use of a different style, X number of paragraphs, etc.), then I could insert an index marker for "apples" on page 17 and Publisher would never suggest indexing all the mentions of apples on pages 18-19. Then I'd be happy to leave this feature on all the time and have Preflight suggest indexing opportunities to me. That would be ideal.

[philipt18]

Another improvement would be to allow one to add variants to what is searched for, or perhaps adding some intelligence. For example, when searching I think it's smart enough to find grammatical variations, but when searching for an index topic, it only searched for the text, and if you add stuff in parenthesis or such, it searches for too much, and misses the actual items. One way to do this might be to allow one to add variants when creating the topic.

Certainly anything that you have that See Also links to that topic, should also be searched. I doubt that's happening now, but it definitely should.

[philipt18]

Another thing it might make sense to search for when searching for an index topic, is to search additionally for the text in the Sort By field.

[philipt18]

And as long as I'm adding things that can be improved, I should mention that when you add a marker, it only shows topic matches that begin with the same text in the field, not ones that match anywhere in the topic name. So, a big problem is searching for a last name when you have the full name of the person as the topic. I run in to this all the time as in the text is a surname by itself, and if I select it and add a marker, it doesn't show any matches, and I need to look up what the person's first name is, which shouldn't be necessary.

[Dennison]

Please, please, please add a "Find Index" - for when the app will not allow an index because it says you already have an index even when there is there is not, and no Index Character or Index Paragraph text styles that might trigger such a message.  This has been requested for several years.