Indexing question...

[Davedb@adobeforums.com]

Hello all,

For starters, I run InDesign CS 3.0.1 and Windows XP Pro.

I need to create an index in an automated way. My workplace had used Pagemaker 6.5 in the past with success. Now they've changed over to InDesign and this has created a problem.

To keep this posting as short as possible, let me just say that back when we used Pagemaker, we had a program that generated a simple, text Pagemaker Tag file. (<PMTags1.0 Win>) I guess this is Pagemaker's version of the tagged text that Indesign uses. We would then import this text file into Pagemaker using the PLACE command.

Anyway, in this Pagemaker tag file, there are author names that will appear in the index that look like this:
<*INDEX 1 1 0 0 0 ("Smith, J E" "" "")>

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how this code works. All that anyone here can tell me is that it's for generating an index of author's names at the end of the publication.

I guess I don't really need to know how it works, since we don't use Pagemaker anymore.

Can anyone tell me if Indesign can be made to do this indexing feature using Indesign Tagged Text? I'm desperate and quite ignorant to this!

Many thanks!
~Dave

[Gabriel_Ayala@adobeforums.com]

I'm not sure I understand the question but I think what you want to do is create index entries.
Highlight the text you want to appear in the Index, create a new index entry from the Index Palette. When you are finished with your entries create a new document in your book and choose "Generate Index" from the fly-out menu on the "Index Palette".

Note: I create index entries by highlighting text and pressing Ctrl+Alt+U on my keyboard. I'm not sure if these are default keys but you can create custom hot keys in your preferences.

I recommend showing the hidden characters (Type>Show Hidden Characters) when you are doing this so you can see where the entries are.

HTH

[Davedb@adobeforums.com]

Hi Gabriel,

Thanks for your input. :)

Unfortunately, I wasn't clear in explaining what I need. Basically, I need to import a tagged text file, but I'm very unclear on how to tag index entries using tagged text.

The PDF help file on the InDesign CD is not very helpful--at least, not to me. It shows different tags that can be used for indexing e.g. <IndexEntryType:IndexPageEntry>, <IndexEntryRangeType:kForNextNParagraphs>, <IndexEntryNumParOrPage:30>.

I've been unsuccessful in figuring out how to use these tags. I tried to experiment with them in a small tagged text file that I created for testing purposes and it crashed InDesign! :(

I guess I really need to know if anyone has any experience with tagged text files and their indexing capabilities. (I should've mentioned this in my first posting. ;) )

[Gabriel_Ayala@adobeforums.com]

Oh, I see... Sorry, I don't have that kind of experience but I'm sure there will be a response very soon. There are a lot of very experienced users here that have taken me out of frustrating situations numerous times in the past.

PS
Check the scripting forum, maybe they can help with a script.

Good luck

[Alan_Gold@adobeforums.com]

We do advertiser, product and other indexes using tagged text exported from a Microsoft Access database. For example, the Access report will include a string like this:
="<Idx:=<IdxEnType:IdxPgEn><IdxEnRngType:kCurrentP age><IdxEnDispStr:" & [ad_insertions.Index_name] & ">>" & [ad_insertions.Index_name]

where [ad_insertions.Index_name] is the field we're indexing, and the first instance of it is the index info, and the second instance is where it actually winds up in a text box on the page in question.

This saves us a great deal of time over manually marking these entries for indexing.

If you're doing an editorial index, I suppose you could do a series of search/replaces on your tagged text source document where all instances of "IndexMe" would be replaced by "<Idx:=<IdxEnType:IdxPgEn><IdxEnRngType:kCurrentPa ge><IdxEnDispStr:IndexMe>>IndexMe"

Or something like that . . .

HTH
AG

[Davedb@adobeforums.com]

Wow! Alan, thank you very much.

I just copied and pasted your line of code <Idx:=<IdxEnType:IdxPgEn><IdxEnRngType:kCurrentPag e><IdxEnDispStr:IndexMe>>IndexMe and it actually does something! :D NOTHING that I was doing (based on Indesign's PDF of tagged text examples) was working.

I feel so dumb for not being able to decipher the syntax for the indexing tags! I can understand the simpler tags.

I wish Adobe had a GOOD tutorial on this. I haven't even been able to find a book that deals with tagged text in depth. I just bought Real World InDesign CS; I'm taking it back.

I think you may have gotten me on the right track. I'll try more experimenting with the index tags. I was on the verge of giving up when I read your post. :)

[Ken_Grace@adobeforums.com]

If you've constructed a text file using the guidelines in the PDF you may
have made a tiny mistake that InDesign choked on when you tried to import
it.

A good way of establishing tagged text syntax is to make a piece of text to
your styling and then export it as tagged text and use it as a template.

k

[Davedb@adobeforums.com]

Hi Ken,

Actually, I did make InDesign crash at one time or another by a simple syntactical error in the tagged text file. Then I smartened up and copied and pasted example bits of code right from the PDF example file. The problem is, I expected to then be able to import that tagged text file and see something happen. It didn't quite work! :D

Yesterday, I tried to create an index right inside Indesign itself. After I created the index, I "generated" it and placed it on a blank InDesign page. Then, I selected the index and exported it as a tagged text file. However, nowhere in the tagged text file did I find anything useful. Maybe I did something wrong?

At any rate, I can't figure out how Alan knew to use the := symbol, as in: <Idx:=<IdxEnType:IdxPgEn>. I saw no such mentioning of this symbol in the tagged text help file. (I haven't even used such a symbol since programming in Pascal quite a long time ago.)

Thanks a lot for your help. :)

[Alan_Gold@adobeforums.com]

As Ken suggests, I "reverse engineered" it by manually creating an index entry in an InDesign document, then exporting that to a tagged text file. Open the tagged text in Notepad and you can figure out what's going on (if not why).

I read the tagged text documentation back with version 1.5, I think, to get a basic understanding of it, but whenever I need to figure out something new, I create it manually in InDesign, export and analyze.

It's a good way to learn HTML, too, for me, anyway.

It sounds like you should export and look at the tagged text from your original ID file, not from the Index you generated and placed in another document. The original file will have the indexing codes, whereas the generated index will just have whatever style codes are used there.

It also helps to turn on "show hidden characters" (under the Type menu) so you can see where the index tag is located.

AG