Indexed words not found in Studio Index panel

[thetasig]

I have a potential bug to share. I have been going through the Studio Index panel to check and see if each Topic's words are all check-marked, as needed. In several topics, the panel shows many words that are indexed under the topic. However, if you perform a right-click "Find" on the topic, the list there is empty. Normally, the same words shown under the topic will show up under the "Find" as well. It seems to be more often than not, a two-word indexing situation. Note: in the examples, the two words "cargo plane" are indexed separately from "cargo" and "plane." Attached two screen shots of the before and after the "Find". Any ideas?

[thetasig]

Alright, I found out why the "find" list is empty in those situations. The "Find" is seeing the Index Mark on the second word - so it does not match, exactly, the Topic. So <mark>cargo <mark>plane does not match "cargo plane" in the find. By removing the index mark from "plane", the Topic "Cargo plane" now finds the indexed item properly.

So - seems like a bug to me - the Index/Topic/Find In Document process should ignore (skip over) index marks (and maybe other non-printing characters?) when searching for matches in the document.

[Jon P]

@thetasig Any chance of attaching the document you used in the above screenshot?

Thanks!

[thetasig]

Instead, I created a simple new document that exhibits the problem, attached.

Go to the Studio Index panel.  Right-click the "Cargo plane" topic and then "Find in Document". Note that the "Find" only returns two items instead of the six different text frames with "Cargo plane" in each. See above for the reason - and the solution. It's a simple matching problem.

Note: In the normal Index Topic list, you can see that the two green text frames have no index on the words "plane" - so the "Find" sees the entire phrase "Cargo plane" and shows only those two. The other four "Cargo Plane" items have an index on the word "plane" - so that [index mark] interferes with the "Find" and they are not listed in the Find. Remove one of those "plane" index marks and then the Find on "Cargo plane" will have three items listed. If you place an index mark for all "plane" words, then the Find on "Cargo plane" will return nothing.

This can happen any time a 2-or-more words are indexed and the individual words are also each indexed. Example the indexed phrase "Go For The Gold" would not be "found" if you also index the word "Gold".

Hopefully, this will be seen as a bug and repaired in a future release. Thanks.

Index Bug Words Not Found.afpub

[thetasig]

Another related little nit. If you are observing the standard "index" Topic list in Studio, when you make indexing changes in the document, the Topic list also automatically updates in real-time. Say that you index a word you missed earlier - that new item will show up in the Topic list right away.

Not so with the "Find" dialogue. It's frozen no matter what indexing changes you make in the document. To see the results of those changes, you have to first click "Done" and then perform the "Find" again.

This may be practically difficult if the Find dialogue has to be recoded to a "real-time" scenario. However, when I made changes to words shown in the "Find" dialogue, I did expect them to update right away.

Not a big problem, just a little nit.

[thetasig]

Digging deeper into this indexing system, I discover that not all apostrophes are alike. At some point, I probably copied a word with an apostrophe from Lightroom or another source. Pasting that into the document. Then the same word was added to another text frame but this time was typed manually in AFPUB.

When it came time to index these two words, I highlighted one and indexed it. Then I used the Studio/Index Topic list to do a "Find" and, mystery, the second word in the document was not found. Looking more carefully, it turned out to be the "type" of apostrophes used in each case were different from one another.

Beware that many such punctuation or diacritical marks may not all be the same in your document and may cause a little confusion as you create and edit.

[Jon P]

Thanks, I've logged the fact that words containing an index mark can't be found by the Index Studio.

[thetasig]

Thanks @Jon P.

I am concerned that there may be some other "invisible" characters that could also interfere with finding indexed items - but I do not have the background to know what kind of characters (if any) that might be.