Indexing -- odd.

[Sharon Villines]

In the first edition of the book I’m revising, I did not use the INDesign indexing feature. I did it entirely in Word, typing entries. Then pasted these in to a separate ID file and added it to the book.

Because my indexer wasn’t able to index the revision before the end of September, I decided to do it again myself. I’ve done two textbooks for publishers so I reviewed Chicago and set about it. I used the InDesign indexing and noticed there were index characters in the text that I didn’t put there. I deleted the ones I saw.

I didn’t use the “index all” feature and the book is in files of 10-15 pages so each one was done separately. Still, when I compiled the index, there were entries from the first edition that I didn’t include in this second one.

How did they get into the text? They even adjusted to the new page numbers.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines, Washington DC

"Reality is something you rise above." Liza Minnelli

[Karen Hickey]

Hi Sharon,

Any time I've indexed in InDesign, I found that I have to proofread it before even generating it, and then of course after generating it.

In my opinion, it's wise to look at all the Index entries in the indexing palette for all the files in the book first, then generate, and then proofread (at least twice!). [not to mention that InDesign doesn't know how to alphabetize.]

Yes, sometimes things show up in InDesign that might have been there in Word (doh!) or even accidentally put in with some keystrokes in InDesign.

And if you're only looking at "hidden characters" in InDesign, any overlapping index markers (two or more in one place) aren't obvious.

Hope this helps!

-Karen

[Hank]

A brief addtion to Karen's comments:
If markers are hard to see, look at the text in Story Editor where you can see the markers as distinct little icons in the lines of text. If useful, keep both the Layout and Story Editor views side by side.
—Hank