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!

If you run an InCopy workflow, or you have found this post by searching the web, you probably know the issue with markup up index words in InCopy - the tool is missing.

In the projects where we run an InCopy workflow, it is mainly books, where the editors easily can proofread and correct in the story itself, and letting them mark up index words would be a great in that process as well. I can't see any obvious reason to why Adobe left it out, other than InCopy might be more minded on magazine editing(?), and there isn't much use for indexing in magazines.

The solution

In books where the index are marked up late in the process, after the book is typeset and proofread, we either mark it up ourselves from a printed copy with highlighted words, or we let the editors mark up the index words in InCopy using a colour swatch. When we receive the InCopy story from them, an AppleScriptJavaScript in InDesign takes care of finding all the coloured words and marking them up as index words. When the script is done, a quick search/replace takes care of colouring the words back to their original colour.

The dialog box that asks you which swatch you want to make an index from.

The script might come in handy in other cases as well, but the InCopy case is the most obvious. The same script could be done with character styles as well, but since I'd like to enable marking up that already have a character style applied, I found swatches better suited.

The script

I have uploaded the basic script - letting you select a swatch from a list and it searches the current document, marking up words. You are free to modify it to your needs - might come in handy to convert words to lowercase or things like that.

You can add it to your Scripts palette and run it from there. To do that, place the file inside the "~/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version X.0/Scripts/Scripts Panel" folder.

Download index_from_colour.jsx.