InDesign Indexing

March 14, 2006 12:13 PM

Automated indexing in InDesign CS-- dream or reality?

This is what I want to do: automatically add every paragraph assigned a certain style sheet as a reference in my index. Is this possible? I can't figure out how to do it. inDesign doesn't seem to want me to automate the indexing at all, actually. There must be a better way than manual! Help me, metafilter, you're my only hope!

posted by miss tea to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Yeah, i don't think you can do that. That's kinda how the TOC feature works though. Index entries have to be created in the Index palette or with key commands as you're stepping through the document.
posted by rschroed at 12:43 PM on March 14, 2006

InDesign's indexing feature is style-agnostic (as is the indexing of every other layout and word-processing program I've ever used) so unless there is some uniformity in the actual text of the index entries, there's no way to do it other than manually.

If you're willing to give up a lot of the index formatting and functionality (such as being able to index page ranges), you could use the TOC function to generate the page references you want and then just style it like an index. Whether that would work depends on how extensive your index is and what you want it to look like.

Seems like it would be possible to write a script to do it, though I don't have much personal experience with ID scripting. After checking a couple of script sites, I didn't see anything already written that will do what you want.
posted by camcgee at 3:29 PM on March 14, 2006