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While I really want the ability to insert multiple indices, there is a relatively easy workaround which will let you create as many indices as you like as long as you can live without the section headings (A, B, C...) As with any workaround you have to do a bit more work but if you're creating a long book and you really want multiple indices, it's worth the trouble.

For each index mark, assign it a parent topic with the name of the index. It's not important what you name them so use names that make sense to you. You might choose to enter "Main" into the Topic field for your primary index or "Sculpture" for an index of sculpture. But you can just use Index1, Index2, Index3... because it's not important.

You can still use subtopics with this approach, just create them inside of your parent index topics. If I chose "Main" from Parent Topic in this screenshot, Minnie Duck would be indexed at the top level of my Main index. If I chose "Main, Ducks" from Parent Topic, it will make Minnie Duck a subtopic of Ducks which is what I want. if I chose "Main, Ducks, Donald Duck", then Minnie Duck would be a subtopic of Donald Duck which isn't want I'd want.

426011229_ScreenShot2022-04-08at4_44_33PM.png.993f3614339ecd582db4e9dc7c32b236.png

It's easy to fix if you forget to add your index marks to the right index, just right click the topic and choose Edit Topic and then correct the Parent Topic. in the left screenshot I messed up and added figures 4 and 5 to the root of the index instead of inside my Figures index, so I just right clicked them and changed Parent Topic to Figures.

1601653375_ScreenShot2022-04-08at4_49_15PM.png.294783c67c4bfdbdab0b8eafffb423bf.png  242418575_ScreenShot2022-04-08at4_50_35PM.png.b1e6aa7fc53bc8a811fee13d46440716.png

Now once you've added some marks, insert the index. Both my Main and Figures indices are joined together of course. 

1575349034_ScreenShot2022-04-08at4_59_42PM.png.28d687cfad3211d5a8427f04ba59921e.png

I would simply copy the text of one index and paste it into another text frame wherever I want to put it and then delete the extraneous text from the real index frame. My result is below and I could have titles in separate frames above these two indices. When it's time to update the index, I would just update the real index as I normally would and then repeat the exercise of copying the text from the real index frame to the other index frame, overwriting the outdated copy of the index. This is trivially easy and it's so much better than manually creating a second index. But you do lose the ability to use the A, B, C... section headings.

955962485_ScreenShot2022-04-08at4_59_07PM.png.a1dc40f046c54694817eb37e2a63b82b.png

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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15 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

While I really want the ability to insert multiple indices, there is a relatively easy workaround which will let you create as many indices as you like as long as you can live without the section headings (A, B, C...) As with any workaround you have to do a bit more work but if you're creating a long book and you really want multiple indices, it's worth the trouble.

 

Great idea, I am jealous I didn't think of it. As you say more work. A great deal more robust than my work around which is make Index A-1 and copy and paste as text then make index B-1 . My idea means indexes won't be easy to update without lots of copying and pasting and making indexes again.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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16 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I would simply copy the text of one index and paste it into another text frame wherever I want to put it and then delete the extraneous text from the real index frame.

Just a thought: have you considered putting the entire index into one frame, scaling that frame to hold exactly the content of the first topic, then linking to another frame for the next topic, so that you can simply adjust the sizes of the frames to ensure that the correct number of entries is displaying in each?

 

Note also that you should be able to use a table of contents rather than an index to create the list of figures and the like, and Publisher does support more than one TOC.  You can probably get away with this any time there is no more than one entry per topic.

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14 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Great idea, I am jealous I didn't think of it. As you say more work. A great deal more robust than my work around which is make Index A-1 and copy and paste as text then make index B-1 . My idea means indexes won't be easy to update without lots of copying and pasting and making indexes again.

I should have mentioned that if you want to use this and really want A...Z section headings, just add those manually as your final step before publication. At least the hard part, the indexation, will already be done.

I know there's already a workaround for cross references but I really hate the idea of all those extra text objects in my document. Here's another option but since this is manual you'd only want to generate the cross ref page numbers once before publication.

  • Add your cross ref destinations or anchors as index markers using something consistent for parent topic - I suggest "x". The actual index topics should be meaningful to you but also very short. So I might enter "Smith" as the index topic and "x" as the parent topic.
  • To add a cross reference to the "Smith" destination or anchor, I'd enter "xSmith" in plain text - it's somewhat important that these text strings not be much wider than the width of the expected page numbers or you could have an unexpected line break change later. So I might use "xSmi" instead.
  • Just before publication, I'd generate the index and cut out the "x" topic section which would be something like this:

xJone     78
xOwe    117
xSmit    231
xWill       82

  • And now I'd manually find and replace the text strings with the page numbers.

The advantage of this approach is you'll have accurate cross references far easier than doing it manually but the downsides are it's a big pain, proofreading would be more difficult, and you can only do it once, because once it's done you can't find the outdated page numbers to update them. But if you want think you might need to repeat this, just format the cross references (i.e., xSmit") with a character style named Cross Reference. This style wouldn't need to have any attributes because then even after changing xSmit to 231 you could find all the cross references later by searching for the style name. You wouldn't immediately know that 231 had been xSmit but you should be able to get that quickly from context and look it up in your index table. Crude but it would work.

I'm actually going to do it in a simpler but more manual way since I only have dozens and not hundreds of cross references. I'm using Insert Anchor to insert an anchor named "Smith" and then the same command to insert a cross reference named "gotoSmith". Then when I want to update my cross ref page numbers, I simply use the Anchors panel to display each page with anchor, i.e., page 231 for the Smith anchor, and then I display the matching cross ref anchor page, i.e., gotoSmith, and type 231 after the anchor.

If we had scripting and if the necessary parts of the object model were exposed, it would be easy to automate this. The script would loop through each anchor in the anchors collection and if it was prefixed with "goto" the script would get the page number of the matching anchor that wasn't prefixed with "goto", and insert that page number to the right of the goto anchor, deleting any existing numbers before the next space. But of course I'd just prefer an Insert Cross Reference command. 🙂 

7 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Just a thought: have you considered putting the entire index into one frame, scaling that frame to hold exactly the content of the first topic, then linking to another frame for the next topic, so that you can simply adjust the sizes of the frames to ensure that the correct number of entries is displaying in each?

Note also that you should be able to use a table of contents rather than an index to create the list of figures and the like, and Publisher does support more than one TOC.  You can probably get away with this any time there is no more than one entry per topic.

Using two linked frames would work if the index "names" (parent topics) were what you wanted readers to see and you were okay with them being alpha sorted (an index named "Index" would appear before an index named "Sculpture Index"). It would be easier to just manually insert a column or page break between them rather than fiddle with the text frame same though.

And yes a TOC would work better for a table of figures in most cases. The challenge is the TOC uses all of the text in the paragraph and you might prefer something shorter. So if the caption on the figure is "Figure 12 - Population Trends in Midwestern Missouri, 1812–1912, R.B. Williamson and S.K. Rawlinson (1938, Winston University Press)", that entire paragraph would be in the table of figures. An index is more flexible for this.

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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  • 7 months later...
5 hours ago, Nathan Shirley said:

Anyone know if this is possible (without a workaround) in v2?

They didn't announce any changes in this area, so probably not.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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