Auto Indexing

[Loquos]

Are there any plans to create an auto-index feature? I swear ID can do this - but all I see in the Publisher Beta is the tedious 'insert index marker' by hand, page by page, for each and every topic you want to index. Surely when you're laying out a reference book or other large publication, there's a more automated way to do this then searching for each instance of a word and then inserting a marker?

Or, like Table of Contents, could there be a way to have words with special formatting automatically flagged to be included in the index?

As it is, indexing currently feels incredibly clunky and incomplete. I do realize this is still in Beta though, so curiosity prompts me to ask if polishing up the index feature is something slated for future releases?

On a positive note, I found the TOC very easy to set up, format, and create - quickly and effectively. Great job!

[Michail]

6 hours ago, Loquos said:

Are there any plans to create an auto-index feature?

What do you mean by auto index? This is how an index works: You search for the words manually and add them as an index entry. At the end you create the index. Only the creation works automatically, but not the indexing. How should the program know which terms you want in the index?

You swear that InDesign can do that. But InDesign does it exactly as I just described it.

[Loquos]

On 12/24/2018 at 5:52 PM, Michail said:

What do you mean by auto index? This is how an index works: You search for the words manually and add them as an index entry. At the end you create the index. Only the creation works automatically, but not the indexing. How should the program know which terms you want in the index?

You swear that InDesign can do that. But InDesign does it exactly as I just described it.

Well then, let's make Publisher better than ID? :-D 

I would think, just like a search and replace, or the TOC, you could tell the program 'search for all instances of X and return the page number this entry occurs on'. You could do this for each word you need to be indexed but you wouldn't have to search for each them manually and stop to manually insert a marker each time. You'd simply input the desired word in the appropriate field when building the index, and the program inserts the page number(s).

This is what I mean by 'auto index' - as opposed to the highly manually 'search, stop, insert index tag, search, stop, insert index tag' of the current workflow, which I think would grow tedious quickly. Like GREP or even Search & Replace, you could specify that words only with a specific format should be considered to tag for indexing.

[walt.farrell]

Indexing, in many cases, is more complex than simply finding the terms and marking them.

If you look at the Text > Insert Index Mark dialog you'll see fields to enter a topic name (which doesn't need to match the term being indexed) and parent topic name (for multi-level indexes). That way "Frederickson, Lewis" and Frederickson, Thomas" could be listed as sub-entries "Lewis" and "Thomas", respectively, of "Frederickson". And other occurrences of "Lewis" or "Thomas" might be unrelated to those, and have their own separate entries.

It might be nice, though, to have an easy way to search for unmarked occurrences of words that already have an index mark. That way, having marked a term once, you could find other occurrences you hadn't marked yet, and decide whether to index each or not, and if so what entry it belongs to.

[jmwellborn]

39 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Indexing, in many cases, is more complex than simply finding the terms and marking them.

If you look at the Text > Insert Index Mark dialog you'll see fields to enter a topic name (which doesn't need to match the term being indexed) and parent topic name (for multi-level indexes). That way "Frederickson, Lewis" and Frederickson, Thomas" could be listed as sub-entries "Lewis" and "Thomas", respectively, of "Frederickson". And other occurrences of "Lewis" or "Thomas" might be unrelated to those, and have their own separate entries.

It might be nice, though, to have an easy way to search for unmarked occurrences of words that already have an index mark. That way, having marked a term once, you could find other occurrences you hadn't marked yet, and decide whether to index each or not, and if so what entry it belongs to.

You are right.   But there is an easy --  if still slightly laborious --  way to search for unmarked occurrences right now.    Just use VIEW>STUDIO>Find and Replace, and then type the word you are looking for (i.e. "woodshed") in the FIND block, and then click on Find below.   Do not enter anything in the Replace or Replace All sections.    You will then get a dropdown of every time the word "woodshed" appears in the document.   Click on each "woodshed" and you will be sent automatically to the page where it appears.    Just note it down, and then manually add the page numbers to the index.    This is clunky, but works.    The only problem with this is that if extra copy is added to a page, and everything else moves to another page, the "woodshed" may turn up somewhere later on.    Just a thought. 

[walt.farrell]

Not a bad thought, @jmwellborn, and one I had in mind, too.

No real need to write down the numbers and add them to the index manually, by the way. When you click on an entry in the result list you you'll be positioned to the word. Hitting Ctrl+Shift+Alt+[ will then add an index mark and let you specify the values or click on OK to accept the defaults. (One could choose a less cumbersome shortcut, of course.)

[AdamW]

Hi,

The context menu for a topic in the Index Panel includes a ‘Find in Document...’ command which should list occurrences of the topic in the document. Specific occurrences can then be included or excluded from the index. Note the ‘Find in Document’ command includes some word stemming support, so for instance a search for ‘find’ would turn up ‘find’, ‘finding’ etc.

[fde101]

On 12/25/2018 at 5:44 PM, AdamW said:

The context menu for a topic in the Index Panel includes a ‘Find in Document...’ command

Could this be extended to include an option that does this for all topics in the index in one step?

[cramosm]

I worked with InDesign for a good number of years and I can tell you that since my first experience with that program I could simply draw up a list of topics independently of the main text and then have the program apply them automatically in creating the index markers. I abandoned all Adobe programs once they started the subscription system. 

[danzefirelli]

On 12/24/2018 at 2:55 PM, Loquos said:

Are there any plans to create an auto-index feature? I swear ID can do this - but all I see in the Publisher Beta is the tedious 'insert index marker' by hand, page by page, for each and every topic you want to index. Surely when you're laying out a reference book or other large publication, there's a more automated way to do this then searching for each instance of a word and then inserting a marker?

Or, like Table of Contents, could there be a way to have words with special formatting automatically flagged to be included in the index?

As it is, indexing currently feels incredibly clunky and incomplete. I do realize this is still in Beta though, so curiosity prompts me to ask if polishing up the index feature is something slated for future releases?

On a positive note, I found the TOC very easy to set up, format, and create - quickly and effectively. Great job!

I agree! We need some sort of auto indexing. Lets say you input only the first and the last. I have a few hundred pages and I*m getting old inserting them 1 by 1.

[Gerald Wall]

On 12/24/2018 at 2:52 PM, Michail said:

What do you mean by auto index? This is how an index works: You search for the words manually and add them as an index entry. At the end you create the index. Only the creation works automatically, but not the indexing. How should the program know which terms you want in the index?

You swear that InDesign can do that. But InDesign does it exactly as I just described it.

Every month I have to create a huge index of names of chess players for a chess publications I publish for a client. It indeed is tedious to manually select and mark hundreds of names and constantly update the index. Not sure why you can't create an index from a style? If all those names are in a particular style such as a certain font, bold and italicized and made into a new style you would think you could select that style and have those names added automatically to the index list and then the indexing software could add the page reference to the index. Probably easy to say but hard to do, but sure would be great to have!

[Michail]

9 hours ago, Gerald Wall said:

Every month I have to create a huge index of names of chess players for a chess publications I publish for a client.

Have you ever thought about creating a list of persons based on a table of contents? In Affinity Publisher you can create several different directories for different purposes. The functionality you want is available.