InDesigning.net

For a long time I have been really frustrated at the sort options in InDesigns index panel.

We do a lot of really complicated books with huge indexes, and mainly these books are in Danish. As you might know, the Danish alphabet is identical to the English, but with three additional letters: Æ, Ø and Å.

You can change the sort options in the index panel.

Changing the sort order to Danish/Norwegian.

The InDesign index only alphabetises from A to Z, but the Sort Options was made to change this. The sort options window lets you prioritise the order of how InDesign should alphabetise, and it works perfectly - for the first letter alone.

I have created a small list of words, using these special characters, and listed them as InDesign would sort them with Danish/Norwegian alphabetising:

• ÆA
• ÆÅ
• ÆB
• ØA
• ØÅ
• ØB
• ÅA
• ÅÅ
• ÅB

Note that the first letter are alphabetised correctly, but the following letters are "ignored", or at least treated as another letter. Æ's and Å's are treated as A's and Ø's are treated as O's.

The correct order would instead be:

• ÆA
• ÆB
• ÆÅ
• ØA
• ØB
• ØÅ
• ÅA
• ÅB
• ÅÅ

I reported the issue as a bug to Adobe and got a kind e-mail reply with an easy fix. Besides changing the sort options to "Danish/Norwegian", changing the documents default language would do the trick.

Make sure you don't have anything selected at all, then launch your character panel (CMD/CTRL+T) and select "Danish" from the language drop down.

Changing the document default language to Danish does the trick.

Note: Even double A's (AA) will be treated as Å's now!