How do I create an index for the entire book as against individual chapters in the book tab in Affinity Publisher 2?

[Into Thine Hand]

Created a book by adding the chapters in the book tab of Publisher 2. However, am only able to create individual chapter index instead of a global index for the entire book.

[MikeTO]

13 hours ago, Into Thine Hand said:

Created a book by adding the chapters in the book tab of Publisher 2. However, am only able to create individual chapter index instead of a global index for the entire book.

Hi and welcome to the forums. That's odd because if a Book is open, inserting an index into any chapter of it should index the entries in every chapter, even if all the chapters are closed. Is your Book open when you insert or update the index or are you working in a document with the Book file closed? Could you share more information on what you're doing?

I tested it again just now and couldn't find any issues with this feature.

Good luck.

[Actonbooks]

Hi, I am new to Affinity which I bought after using inDesign CS2 for decades, yes I know!

I have painstakingly imported 46 chapters into a 300 page non-fiction book (front matter to come) as they were ancient inDesign files.

I have not made the chapters into sections.

I have begun indexing with all chapters open, but the 'find' is only picking up the reference in the chapter from which I flag the topic. It is not searching all the open chapters as I think in is meant to.

Is this correct or am I doing something wrong -- or not doing something I should?

I read Mike Loader and watched Elaine Giles but cannot see my error

Mike TO (is that Loader?) said in reply to a similar request in April from Into Thy Hand, that it should work (it's above).

I have 2.5.3 by the way.

Thanks

 

[MikeTO]

@Actonbooks Hi and welcome to the forums. You're not doing anything wrong but it won't work. There's a sidebar tip in my manual that states that the Find in Document feature doesn't work across an entire book, it just works within a single document. I think the Find in Document feature was overlooked when Books were added in 2.0. It has been reported to Serif so it's on their list.

It would be tedious, but you'll have to use this feature for each term in each of the 46 chapters for these. That's sounds like an enormous amount of work if you have a lot of terms to index. But there may be a solution.

You likely don't need to use the Book feature. People come to Affinity thinking they've used the Books feature in InDesign and therefore they need to use it in Affinity, but you don't really need to. Affinity Publisher is very efficient and can handle most book projects as a single document. The important factor in whether Affinity can handle your book as a single document isn't the number of pages, words, or images but the length of a story and the number of inline images in the story. A story is the text in a series of linked frames. You should be able to work with a 300-page book of 46 chapters as long as each chapter is a separate story.

This will be easy to test but close the Affinity Book file and all of its chapters before starting.

1. Make a backup copy of the first document and work with the backup, not the original
2. Choose Document > Add Pages from File, select the second document, and add all the pages in that document. They will be appended to the first document. (If the first document was front matter and numbered i, ii, iii, you'll need to insert a new section and restart page numbering using 1, 2, 3 but you can't do that later.)
3. Repeat step 2 for every other document.
4. Save this as a new file

When you're done, all of your chapters will be a separate story in the combined document. Try working with this document for a bit and I think you'll find the performance is virtually indistinguishable from working with separate chapter files. Now the Index > Find In Document feature will work across your entire book.

Good luck

[Actonbooks]

My homework for today!  I guessed there would be rabbit holes with new software. I've already discovered not to try to synchronise as master pages multiply -- like rabbits.

Thanks for the advice. Adding pages from file does produce this or split the previous chapter to insert the next even though the word after. Or, in the alternative freezes or crashes... Hey ho. software huh!

[Actonbooks]

[GarryP]

I can’t help with the problem as I don’t use the Books functionality but the fact that (if I'm interpreting what I can see properly) your third book ends on age 18 and the fourth book starts on page 17, while the fourth book ends on page 20 but the fifth book start on page 20, might be a problem.

[Actonbooks]

Garry,

I had not noticed and yes, I guess that might be a problem!! I'm on it and thanks for noticing what I had not. The word "duh!" comes to mind. As I said earlier I'm a newbie who has lived with inDesign from Adobe CS2 and, yes, Quark. They were like driving a 40 year old clunker car, but I sort of got used to them. I guess upgrading to a flashy new hybrid without passing the Adobe modernisations (and the ripoff pricing) has left me at the back of the class.

 

Thanks again,

 

Martin

[GarryP]

Unfortunately I can’t help with Book-related issues, but if you’ve got MikeTO helping you then you’re in good hands.

[MikeTO]

Adding pages from a file shouldn't overlay text frames on top of each other - it should append the pages at the end, before, or between the pages you've chosen. But obviously it's doing something wrong. Ideally you'd share two files here that produce the problem but if you can't do that a screen recording showing how this happens might be helpful. Good luck.