Feature request: APub indexing primitives

[rufus]

I am currently in the process of indexing a 150 page technical book. The process, using the APub indexing facilities, is essentially manual. The bigger the book, the more important the index is, and the longer it takes to manually mark out the index. I've searched through the indexing-related feature requests. All that I've read would help a bit. But some automation is sorely needed. I'll point out that primitive but useable indexing automation was provided as early as some of the early releases of the Unix operating system in the early 1980s.

My request is to provide a set of regular expression-based indexing primitives, much in the same way that APhoto provides photo editing primitive functions. These functions can be scripted to provide higher level functions, and many such photo editing scripts are made available by users on the support forums. I fully understand that at the APub price point a lot of features of any kind cannot be added. My suggestion is essentially to take the same long term approach that was taken for APhoto. Give users the scripting primitives needed to build our own higher level indexing facilities.

[walt.farrell]

That sounds like it would be a useful extension to the existing Find in Document functionality for adding Index marks, and one that is likely to be under consideration for the Scripting function that Serif has assured us is coming someday.

In the meantime, Find in Document is all that's available, as far as I know. In case you haven't found it, it's described on this page of the Help (and on the Index Panel page): https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/pages/Advanced/index.html