Index / indexing has disappeared out of all independent file chapters of a book. How to recover them?

[dbon]

I have a book with 10+ chapters that I meticulously indexed. I had it generated in it's own chapter, and it worked great. All formated, beautiful. I had made a few text changes in a couple of the documents (added some text), and now ALL the index marks from all the chapters are gone, in all the independent files. Come to think of it I don't even know how to remove an index mark if I wanted to. HOW are they ALL gone, except for...2? And the 2 just seem like randoms. The only type of global things that could have happened was style syncs and page numbering as I tweaked the book and added or removed a few pages as it developed.

Very, very, very, very, very frustrating. I added one index mark back so now I have 3, and it generated correctly. So where the hell did all the other marks go? What a catastrophic bug, or terrible UI if I somehow triggered a mass deletion purgation from all the files, many of which have NOT had to be opened at all through the final stages of the book, other than the automated opening and closing the files might have had when page numbers got altered do to material being added or removed to the introductory chapters.

Is this a known bug? Is there any trick to make the index marks show back up in all these chapters? Anyone else have this happen?

[MikeTO]

I read all the Index questions here and I've never heard of anybody else reporting this. It sounds awful.

You can delete all the index marks in a document at once by selecting them in the panel and clicking the Delete icon. But there's no way to do that by accident, and no way to do that by accident for all of your chapters at once. Something must have gone wrong.

Are the index topics gone, too, or just the marks?

I would open each chapter one by one and confirm that there are no index marks in any of the chapters.

[dbon]

@MikeTO thanks for the reply. I've been a Pagemaker / Quark / InDesign user for 3 decades (WTF!), but this is my first book on AP. I had not yet gotten to a place where i needed to edit index marks so didn't even know there was a comprehensive index view until after I wrote this question LOL. That said, I opened all the individual chapters one by one and ALL the marks were gone. I toggled the view, etc. They were just gone. If there was some secret keystroke that deleted them all with no safety check dialogue box, then I did that. Or, some aspect of file management or a bug in indexing did it. I'm not going to lose sleep. I'm going to recreate them. There wasn't THAT many but still.

 

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, dbon said:

@MikeTO thanks for the reply. I've been a Pagemaker / Quark / InDesign user for 3 decades (WTF!), but this is my first book on AP. I had not yet gotten to a place where i needed to edit index marks so didn't even know there was a comprehensive index view until after I wrote this question LOL. That said, I opened all the individual chapters one by one and ALL the marks were gone. I toggled the view, etc. They were just gone. If there was some secret keystroke that deleted them all with no safety check dialogue box, then I did that. Or, some aspect of file management or a bug in indexing did it. I'm not going to lose sleep. I'm going to recreate them. There wasn't THAT many but still.

The index feature is pretty robust because it's been in Publisher since day one. The Books feature was introduced a year ago and there may still be some gremlins in it. I recommend making backups.