Chapter 8. Long Documents
What constitutes a long document? Die-hard denizens of the FrameMaker universe insist that if a document isn’t over a thousand pages, it’s not a long document. Poster designers, on the other hand, maintain that folded flyers and newsletters qualify.
We’re not sure what our definition of a “long document” is, but we think that anyone building a book, a magazine, a newspaper, a journal, or a catalog—just about any document, really, of any number of pages—can benefit from the long document features in InDesign.
There are three features in InDesign that relate directly to publishing long documents.
• Books. You can tie multiple documents together into a book, which appears in the form of a panel in InDesign. From here, you can control page numbering, printing, and synchronize document attributes as styles, colors, and master pages.
• Table of Contents. If you use paragraph styles regularly, you’re going to love the Table of Contents feature, which can build a table of contents (or a list of figures, or a table of advertisers, or any number of other things) quickly and easily.
• Indexes. Building an index is a hardship we wouldn’t wish on anyone (we’ve done enough of them ourselves), but InDesign’s indexing features go a long way toward making it bearable.
Books
Even though an InDesign document can be thousands of pages long, it’s best to split long documents up into smaller parts. Splitting a large project into smaller parts is generally more efficient, especially when more than one person is working on the project at the same time. The burning question is: if you break up your project into small documents, how can you ensure style consistency and proper page numbering among them? The answer is InDesign’s Book feature.
In InDesign, a book is a collection of InDesign documents on your disk or network that are loosely connected with each other via the Book panel. Just because it’s called a “book” doesn’t mean it’s not relevant for magazines, catalogs, or any other set of documents.
There are five benefits to using the Book panel.
• It’s a good way to organize the documents in a project, and it’s faster to open them using the Book panel than with File > Open.
• If you use automatic page numbering in your document (see “Numbering Pages” in Chapter 2, “Page Layout”), InDesign can manage the page numbering throughout the entire book.
• You can print, package, or export one or more documents from the Book panel using the same settings without even having the documents open.
• The Synchronize feature helps you ensure that styles, colors, and other settings are consistent among the documents.
• By associating files together as a book, you can mix page sizes and page orientations in a publication—which you can’t do in a single InDesign document (without a third-party plug-in).
The more documents there are in your project, and the more pages, styles, colors, and whatnot are used in each document, the more useful the Book feature will be to you. Even if you’re juggling two or three documents, it may be worth the minor inconvenience it takes to build a book.
Building a Book
To build a new book, select Book from the New submenu of the File menu. At this point, InDesign displays the New Book dialog box. Tell the program where to save your new book file (you can put it anywhere you want on your hard drive or network, but you should put it somewhere easy to find—because you’ll be using it a lot).
Book files appear in InDesign as panels. When you’ve saved your new book, InDesign displays a new Book panel.
Adding and Removing Book Documents
To add a document to your Book panel, click the Add Document button in the panel and choose a document from your disk or network (see Figure 8-1). If no documents on the panel are selected when you add a new document, the new document is added at the end of the list. If you select a document first, the new document is added after the selected document. You can drag files directly from Windows Explorer or from the Mac OS X Finder into a book panel; this is often the fastest way to get a folder full of files into a book.
Figure 8-1 Adding a Book Document
If you accidentally insert a document in the wrong place in a Book panel, don’t worry—you can move a document up and down on the list. To do this, select the book document and drag it to a new location in the list (see Figure 8-2).
Figure 8-2 Moving a Book Document
Although Adobe’s documentation points out that you can copy a document from one book panel to another by Option-dragging/Alt-dragging, we don’t recommend this in most cases. Having the same document in more than one book can cause pagination problems and general confusion.
To remove a document from a Book panel, select the document and click the Remove Document button. If you want to remove more than one document, select the documents (use Shift for contiguous selections, or Command/Ctrl for discontinuous selections on the list) and then click the Remove Document button. Note that deleting a document from the Book panel does not delete the file from disk; it simply removes it from the list.
To replace a book document, select the document in the Book panel and choose Replace Document from the Book panel menu. InDesign displays the Replace Document dialog box. Locate and select the file you want to replace the document with, then click the OK button to close the dialog box and replace the document.
Converting Books from Past Versions
InDesign CS5 can open and convert books saved in previous versions of InDesign. It’s pretty straightforward—just open the book. There are a couple of options that can help you—or hurt you—during the process of converting the book and the documents in the book.
• If, after opening the book, you choose Save Book from the Book panel menu, InDesign will over write the InDesign book file with the converted book. Unless you have a backup copy of the book file, we think that you should save the converted book to a new book file by choosing Save Book As.
• After you’ve opened and converted a book from an earlier version of InDesign, you can select the Automatic Document Conversion option from the Book panel menu. While this sounds like a great idea, it will over write every InDesign document in the book with an InDesign CS5 version of the document. Again, unless you have a backup of the previous version files, we think you should avoid this option. If you do not use this option, you’ll need to save each document in the book to a new file.
Using a Book As a Navigational Tool
Because there is only a very loose connection among the various documents in the Book panel, you could use this feature as an informal database of documents. For instance, let’s say you’ve built 15 different product data sheets and three small brochures for a client, and the client is forever updating them. Even though the documents may each use very different colors, styles, and so on, you could put them all on one Book panel and save this collection under the client’s name. Next time the client calls for a quick fix, you don’t have to go searching for a document; just open the Book panel and double-click the document name to open it.
However, if you do this, you probably first want to turn off the book panel’s autorenumbering feature (see “Page Numbering and Sections,” later in this chapter).
Editing Your Book
Once you’ve added documents to your Book panel, you can go about your regular routine of editing and preparing the documents. There are, as usual, a few things you should keep in mind.
• Whenever possible, you should open your book’s documents while the Book panel is open. (The fastest way to open a document is to double-click the document name in the Book panel.) When you open and modify a document while the panel is not open, the panel isn’t smart enough to update itself (see “File Status,” below). If InDesign can’t find your document (perhaps it’s on a server that is not mounted), it’ll ask you where it is.
• In general, if you’re going to use automatic page numbering, you should let the Book panel handle your page numbering for you (see “Page Numbering and Sections,” later in this section).
• Each time we use Save As, we change the name slightly (“mydocument1,” “mydocument2,” and so on), so we can always go back to an earlier version if necessary. However, note that the Book panel doesn’t catch on to what you’re doing; it just lists and keeps track of the original document. So every time you use Save As, you have to select the original file and select Replace Document from the Book panel’s menu.
Note that you cannot Undo or use Revert to Saved for changes in the Book panels. Also, be aware that the changes you make to your Book panel, including adding, removing, and reordering documents, aren’t saved until you close the panel, quit InDesign, or select Save Book from the panel’s menu.
File Status
As you work with book documents, the Book panel monitors and displays the status of each document in the book. There are five possible icons in the Status column of the panel: Available, Open, Modified, Missing, or In Use (see Figure 8-3).
• Available. The normal status of a document is Available (no icon). This means that no one has the document open for editing and that the document has not changed since the last time it was open on the computer you’re using.
• Open. When you have a document open on your system, the status of that file is listed as Open (an open book icon).
• Modified. When you or anyone else who has access to the file opens and changes a document while the Book panel is not open, the status will be listed as Modified in the Book panel (triangle icon). It’s easy to change the status back to Available: open the file while the Book panel is open, then close the document again. Or, even easier: select Update Numbering from the panel’s menu.
• Missing. If you move a document after adding it to the Book panel, InDesign won’t be able to find it, and the status is listed as Missing (red stop sign icon). To “find” a file again, double-click the chapter name in the Book panel; InDesign displays the Replace Document dialog box in which you can tell it where the document now resides.
• In Use. If someone else on your network opens one of the documents in your book via the Book panel, the Status field of the Book panel lists that chapter as in use (padlock icon).
Figure 8-3 Book Panel Status Icons
It’s important to pay attention to the Status column readings, because documents must be either Available or Open in order to synchronize, print, or renumber properly.
Books and Networks
People are increasingly working on projects in groups rather than individually. Adobe anticipated this, and if you put your book file and documents on a server, more than one person can open the panel at the same time. (Only one person can open an InDesign document at a time, however.) While this isn’t as powerful as a full-blown document management system, it’s certainly useful if a group of people have to work on different documents in the book at the same time.
We don’t like working on documents when they’re on a server. It makes us nervous, and it’s also really slow. Instead, we prefer to copy the file to our local hard drive, edit it at our leisure, and then return the file to the server when we’re done with it.
There are two problems with this. First, the Book panel doesn’t update properly. Second, other people on your network might not realize that you’ve got the “live” file, so make it clear to them: hide the document on the server, or put it in another folder called “work in progress” or something like that.
Synchronizing Your Book Documents
The more documents you’re working with, the more likely it is that one or more of them contain settings inconsistent with the others in the book. Perhaps you decided to change a style definition in one document out of 20, and then forgot to change it in the other 19. Or perhaps your art director decided to change a Pantone color in a document and you now need to update the color in all of the other documents in the book.
Fortunately, the Synchronize Book button on the Book panel lets you ensure that items such as styles and color settings are consistent throughout the documents in a book. Here’s how it works.
The Master Document
One document on the Book panel is always marked as the master document (by default, it’s the first document you add to the panel; InDesign’s documentation refers to this document as the style source document). The master document—which has a cryptic little icon to the left of it—is the document to which all the other documents will be synchronized. That means that if you add a new color to the master document and click the Synchronize Book button, the color will be added to all of the other documents in the book. If you add a new color to a document that is not the master document, the color won’t be added when you synchronize the documents.
You can always change which document is the master document. To do that, click in the left column of the Book panel next to the document you want to set as the master document.
Synchronize
In order to synchronize your book documents, you must first select which files you want to synchronize in the Book panel; remember that you can Shift-click to select contiguous documents or use Command-click/Ctrl-click to select discontinuous documents. Or, if you want to synchronize all the files, make sure that no documents (or all documents) are selected in the panel.
• A style, color swatch, variable, numbered list, or master page that is defined in the master document but not in another document gets added to that other document.
• If a setting is named the same in both the master document and another document, the definition for that setting in the master document overrides the one in the non-master document.
• If a setting is not defined in the master document but exists in some other document, it’s left alone. (This means you can have “local” settings that exist in one document that don’t have to be copied into all the others.)
• By selecting Synchronize Options in the Book panel’s menu, you can choose which settings will be synchronized among the documents (see Figure 8-4). However, if the master document contains table of contents styles (which we talk about later in this chapter) and you turn on the TOC Styles check box in the Synchronize Options dialog box, all the character and paragraph styles are synchronized, even if you’ve turned off the Character Styles and Paragraph Styles check boxes. Select Smart Match Style Groups if you have moved styles in or out of style groups (folders) and all your styles are uniquely named.
Figure 8-4 Synchronization Options
Synchronizing a document can be a time-consuming process—the more documents and the more settings, the longer it takes.
Page Numbering and Sections
Perhaps the most helpful aspect of the Book feature is that it keeps track of your page numbering for you and updates the page numbers when you add pages to or delete them from a document, or if you add a new document between two other documents in a book. Of course, this only works if you’ve placed automatic page numbers on your document pages (see “Numbering Pages” in Chapter 2).
Let’s say you’ve got one 16-page document in your Book panel already. When you add another document, InDesign automatically sets its first page number of the new document to 17 (provided you had not already specified the first page as a section start in the Numbering and Section Options dialog box). If you later open the first document and add two pages, InDesign automatically renumbers the second document—the next time you open it, you’ll see that it starts on page 19.
If, on the other hand, you use the Numbering and Section Options dialog box (you can jump to this feature quickly by double-clicking on the page numbers in the Book panel) to create a section start, the Book panel respects that. Any subsequent documents in the Book panel continue the page numbering from where the previous document’s page numbering left off.
If you don’t use automatic page numbers, or you have manually specified page numbers for each document in your book, you will probably tire of watching InDesign repaginate your book. Fortunately, you can turn this feature off by selecting Book Page Numbering Options from the Book panel’s menu, and unchecking Automatically Update Page and Section Numbers (see Figure 8-5).
Figure 8-5 Book Page Numbering Options
Odd Versus Even Page Numbers
When chapter 2 ends on page 45, what page number does InDesign assign to the first page of chapter 3? If you’re in the book business, you probably want chapter 3 to start on page 47, because it’s a right-hand page. (Olav insists on editing and/or adjusting the layout to avoid a blank left-hand page.) Catalog and magazine publishers would want the third file to begin on page 46, even though it’s a left-hand page. You can specify what you want InDesign to do by choosing Book Page Numbering Options from the Book panel’s menu. You’ve got three choices: Continue from Previous Document, Continue on Next Odd Page, and Continue on Next Even Page.
When you turn on the Insert blank page option, InDesign adds a page to fill any gaps between chapters. For example, if chapter 2 ends on page 45 and you turn on the Continue on Next Odd Page, then InDesign adds a blank page at the end of chapter 2. This page is truly blank—it’s not based on any master page. If you want a running head on that page, you’ll have to apply the master page yourself. (By the way, David once almost drove himself mad trying to figure out why he couldn’t delete the last page from a document. The answer, of course, was that he had forgotten this feature was on.)
Chapter Numbering
If you’d like to number each document in your book, you can let InDesign handle the numbering for you using chapter numbers. To set up chapter numbering, select the first page in the document, then choose Numbering & Section Options from the Layout menu (or from the Pages panel menu). In the Document Chapter Numbering section of the dialog box (see Figure 8-6), choose a numbering Style (such as regular numerals, roman numerals, or letters). Then choose whether you want to specify a chapter number for this book or base the number off the chapter number of the previous document in the book panel. Note that even though a single document can have multiple sections, it can have only one chapter number.
Once you have set up the Numbering & Section Options dialog box, you can “type” the chapter number in a text frame by inserting a chapter number text variable. For more information on text variables, see Chapter 3, “Text.”
Note that when your chapter numbering changes (for example, if you rearrange the order of the documents in the book panel), the chapter numbers in your documents are not updated until you choose Update All Numbers or Update Chapter & Paragraph Numbers from the Update Numbering submenu in the book panel’s menu. If the number on the screen in front of you still doesn’t update, remember that text variables only change when you force the screen to redraw.
Printing and Exporting Books
Even though we cover printing documents in Chapter 11, “Printing,” we should take this opportunity to mention a few things that are specific to printing, packaging, or exporting books.
Each chapter in a book must be listed as Open, Available, or Modified on the Book panel in order for the document to print. InDesign invisibly opens each document at print or export time.
If you only want certain documents in a book to print or be exported, select them in the Book panel. Hold down the Shift to select contiguous documents, or Command/Ctrl to select non-contiguous documents. If no documents are selected, they’ll all print. (Click in the blank area at the bottom of the panel to deselect all documents.)
When you’re ready to print, click the Print Book button in the Book panel or select Print Book (or Print Selected Documents) from the panel’s menu.
You can export your book as an Acrobat PDF file by choosing Export Book to PDF (or Export Selected Documents to PDF) from the panel’s menu. If you turn on the Create Acrobat Layers checkbox when you export the PDF, InDesign merges all layers that have the same name into a single PDF layer. However, if you first deselect Merge Identically Name Layers on Export in the book panel’s menu, the PDF will include individual layers for each document.
Choose Export Book to EPUB from the panel menu to export your book to EPUB format. Each document in the book starts on a new page in the eBook.
To package all the documents in the book, and their required fonts and linked graphics, choose Package Book for Print from the panel’s menu. When you package a book, all the linked graphics are copied into a single Links folder. If your documents contains graphics that are unique but have the same name, InDesign is smart enough to automatically rename them.
Table of Contents
Don’t get fooled into thinking the Table of Contents feature (under the Layout menu) is only for making book tables of contents. This feature lets you build collections of paragraphs that have been tagged with specific styles. For instance, if you use even two styles when you’re formatting a book—one for the chapter name and another for your first-level headings—you can build a basic table of contents by collecting all the paragraphs tagged with these two styles. But if you use paragraph styles to tag your product names, you could just as easily build an index of products for a catalog. Anything you can tag with a paragraph style, you can build into a “table of contents.”
This all depends entirely on your using styles. You should be using styles anyway—if you’re not, you’re working way too hard; refer to Chapter 4, “Type,” to see why you should.
Making a Table of Contents
Making a table of contents (or a list of figures, or whatever) is easy, but it requires a methodical approach to the Table of Contents dialog box (see Figure 8-7).
1. If you only have one list (table of contents, list of figures, etc.) in your document, you can leave the Style pop-up menu set to [Default]. We’ll cover table of contents styles later in this section.
2. Fill in a name for your list in the Title field. InDesign places this title at the beginning of the list, so you might want to type “Table of Contents” or “Advertisers” or something like that. We usually leave this field blank and later make our own title on the document page. If you do include a title, choose a paragraph style for it from the Style pop-up menu to the right of the Title field. (InDesign automatically adds a paragraph style called “TOC title” to your document when you open this dialog box, but you don’t have to use that style if you don’t want to.)
3. Choose the paragraph styles that you want included from the list on the right. You can click the Add button to add them to the list, but double-clicking the style names is faster. You can also select more than one style (by Command/Ctrl-clicking each one) and then click Add to add them all at once (in which case they’re added alphabetically—if you want to rearrange the order, just click and drag the style names after adding them).
4. One by one, click each style in the Include Paragraph Styles list and choose a paragraph style for it from the Entry Style pop-up menu. This is helpful because you’d rarely want a heading from your document to appear in your table of contents in the actual Heading style; instead, you’d probably create a new style called “TOC-head” or something like that. If you want certain paragraphs to be indented on your final list, you should apply styles here that include indentation. InDesign adds a paragraph style called “TOC body text” to your document when you open this dialog box, but you don’t have to use it—we just roll our own.
5. If your document is included in a Book panel, you can choose to include the entire book in your list by turning on the Include Book Documents check box.
6. Finally, when you click OK, InDesign builds the table of contents (which might take a little while, especially if you have many documents in a book). When it’s done, InDesign displays the text place icon, just as if you had imported a text file (see Chapter 4, “Text,” if you need to know more about placing text).
Figure 8-7 Creating a Table of Contents
More Table of Contents Options
The default Table of Contents dialog box gives you the basic controls you need for a simple table of contents, but for most lists we make we click the More Options button, which gives us more options for fine-tuning the table of contents (see Figure 8-8).
• Page Number. You may not want every entry in your table of contents to be followed by a page number. Perhaps you want page numbers after the headings, but not after the chapter titles in a book. You can control how page numbers will appear with the Page Number pop-up menu. You’ve got three options for numbering: After Entry, Before Entry, and None. The first two tell InDesign to include the page number (either before or after the entry), separated from the text of the paragraph by a tab character. We typically create a character style for the page numbers and select it from the Style pop-up menu to the right of the Page Number menu. This way, all the page numbers appear the same rather than appearing in the Entry Style.
• Between Entry and Number. By default, InDesign places a tab character between the entry and the page number (whether the page number is before or after the entry). However, you can change this to some other character or characters. For instance, we usually replace the ^t character (which is code for a tab) with ^y (a right-indent tab, which always sits flush on the right margin, even if you haven’t placed a tab stop). If you’re planning on including dot leaders between the entries and the page numbers (which you would set up in the Tabs panel), you may want to pick a character style from the Style pop-up menu. A regular dot leader looks too much like periods in a row (which is exactly what it is), so we often make a character style of 7-point text with 500 units of tracking, then apply this style to the leader.
• Sort Entries in Alphabetical Order. If you turn on the Sort Entries in Alphabetical Order option in the Table of Contents dialog box, InDesign sorts the list in alphabetical order when you build it. Whether or not you want your final list alphabetized is up to you; you probably wouldn’t want it when you build the table of contents for a book, but you might if you’re creating a list of items in a catalog.
• Level. Each paragraph style you include appears with a different indent in the Include Paragraph Styles list. You can control how much indent with the Level feature. This only adjusts the display in this dialog box; it has no effect on the final list unless your list is alphabetized—in which case, the entries are alphabetized by level.
• Run-in. Some tables of contents, such as those found in academic journals, are “run-in”—that is, the headings are all in one paragraph, separated by semicolons. If you want this sort of list, turn on this option (see Figure 8-9).
• Include Text on Hidden Layers. This option is pretty self-explanatory. If you have multiple layers in your document, you can choose whether to include the text on those layers even when the layers are hidden. While it’s rare that you’d turn this on, you might do so if you have made a layer that contains keywords or explanatory text that you want in the table of contents but don’t want in print (see the next section).
• Numbered Paragraphs. If you have used automatic paragraph numbering in your document, you have a choice of what will appear in the table of contents: the entire paragraph (with the numbering), the paragraph with no number, or only the number.
Figure 8-8 More Table of Contents Options
Using Dummy Text for Lists
One of the things we like most about tables of contents is that they’re document-wide rather than simply story-wide. That means that any text in any text frame can be included in a table of contents—even text in a nonprinting text frame. With this in mind, you can add “tags” to items on your page that don’t appear in print, but do appear in your table of contents.
One of the best uses for this trick is an advertiser index. You can place a text frame with an advertiser’s name on top of an ad in your document. Set the text frame’s color to None and turn on Nonprinting Object in the Attributes panel (or put the frame on a hidden layer), and it’s almost as though this were a “non-object”—the text won’t print, and it won’t affect the ad underneath. But if that advertiser’s name is tagged with a style, you can include it on a list of advertisers.
The same trick applies to building a list of pictures in a catalog, or for any other instance where what you want on the list doesn’t actually appear on the page.
Building and Rebuilding Tables of Contents
There is nothing magic about the text or page numbers in your table of contents—they’re just regular text and numbers. That means if you update the document on which the list is based (such as adding pages or changing the text), the entries and page numbers in the table of contents don’t automatically update, and you will have to rebuild it. We find that we build and rebuild a table of contents several times for each document or book. It isn’t that we’re having so much fun with the feature—it’s that we make mistakes.
To update a table of contents, use the Selection tool or Text tool to select the text frame containing the list, then choose Update Table of Contents from the Layout menu. Or, if you want to make a change to the Table of Contents dialog box settings, you can choose Table of Contents from the Layout menu, make the changes, turn on the Replace Existing Table of Contents check box, and click OK.
Table of Contents Styles
Everything we’ve said about table of contents so far is based on the idea that you have only one of these in your document. However, you can define lots of different table of contents styles in a single document—one for headings, one for figures, one for bylines, and so on. The easiest way to do this is to build various table of contents styles, which are simply saved collections of settings. Once you set up the Table of Contents dialog box just the way you want it, you can click the Save Style button to save this setup as a style (see Figure 8-10). Later, you can reload those settings by choosing your style from the TOC Style pop-up menu at the top of the dialog box.
Figure 8-10 Creating a Table of Contents Style
A second way to build a “style” is to select Table of Contents Styles from the Layout menu and click New. You get a nearly identical dialog box, but when you click OK your settings are saved for use later. You can also use the Table of Contents Styles feature to delete and edit styles, or load them from other InDesign documents.
Note that if you save your table of contents style after building a table of contents in your document, InDesign isn’t smart enough to match your built list to the style name. That means you can’t use the Replace Existing Table of Contents feature. Instead, you’ll have to delete the already-built list and replace it with a new one.
Indexes (Or Indices)
Sitting down and indexing a book is—in our experience—the most painful, horrible, mind-numbing activity you could ever wish on your worst enemy. And yet, where this is the kind of task that a computer should be great at, it’s actually impossible for a computer to do a good job of indexing a book by itself. A good index requires careful thought, an understanding of the subject matter, and an ability to keep the whole project in your head at all times. In short, it requires comprehension—a quality computer software, at this early stage of its evolution, lacks. Until recently, it also required a large stack of note cards, highlighter pens, Post-It notes, and serious medication.
Fortunately, InDesign has a built-in indexing feature, which, while it won’t make the index for you, does remove the note card and highlighter requirements.
Some people ask us, “Why can’t a computer build an index? InDesign should just give me a list of all the words in my document and what page they’re on.” Unfortunately, this is not an index; it’s a concordance. A concordance records the location of words; an index records the location of ideas. There are times when a concordance can be useful, especially in catalogs. In those cases, you might want to use a plug-in such as Sonar Bookends, which can build concordances automatically and very quickly. But in general, if you’re looking for an index, you’re going to have to do it manually with InDesign’s indexing features.
You can index a document at any time in the production cycle, but it’s almost always best to wait until the text has become fixed—until no text in the document will be deleted, copied, cut, pasted, and so on. The reason: as you edit the text, you may accidentally delete index markers.
The Index panel (choose Index from the Type & Tables submenu, under the Window menu) lets you add either single words or whole phrases to the index, and it displays a list of currently indexed words and phrases (see Figure 8-11). First we’re going to discuss how to add, edit, and remove index entries with the Index panel. Then we’ll explore how to collect all the tagged entries and build a finished index on your document pages.
A Note to the Author Contemplating Self-Indexing. Hire a professional indexer. You simply know the material too well to create a useful index. A professional indexer will read and understand your text, and will create an index that opens it up to a wider range of possible readers than you ever could. It’s what they do.
Adding a New First-Level Index Entry
There’s very little that is automatic about building an index. Again, it’s not difficult, but you have to be methodical about it. Here are the steps you should go through for each new index entry. (Note that we always differentiate between a new index entry or topic and a new reference to an index entry. For example, “Pigs” might be a new entry for page 34, but when it appears again on page 59, it would simply be a new reference to your already added index entry—see “Adding a New Reference to an Entry,” later in this section.)
To add an index entry, follow these steps (see Figure 8-12).
1. If the word or phrase you want indexed appears on the page, select it and click the New Entry button at the bottom of the Index panel, or select New Page Reference from the panel’s menu (or better yet, just press Command-7/Ctrl-7). If the index entry isn’t found on the page, place the text cursor anywhere in the text related to the topic and click the New Entry button. For example, a page may include a discussion of cows, but you want to index the word under the phrase “Farm animals.” In this case, you would simply insert the cursor in the text and click New Entry (or press the keystroke).
2. In the New Page Reference dialog box, edit the entry under the Topic Levels heading, if needed. Whatever you type here will be what shows up in the index. Since we’re focusing on first-level entries right now, you can just skip over the other two Topic Levels fields. (We’ll discuss the finer points of second-level entries in “Adding a New Second-Level Index Entry,” later.)
3. Index entries always appear in alphabetical order. However, occasionally you may not want your index entry to appear where it would normally be alphabetized. For instance, the famous “17-Mile Drive” would ordinarily be placed at the beginning of the index, before the “A”s. You can place it along with other words that begin with “S” by typing “Seventeen” in the first Sort As field of the New Page Reference dialog box. You’ll probably leave this field blank most of the time.
4. The Number Style Override feature is yet one more control that you will ignore most of the time. Let’s say you want the page numbers that refer to an illustration (rather than to just text on the page) to appear bold in the final index. You can build a character style to define how you want the page numbers to appear and—when you’re indexing that illustration—you can turn on the Number Style Override check box and choose that character style from the pop-up menu.
5. An index entry can span a range of pages or text. If, for example, your treatise on pigs and goats spans six pages of your document, you don’t want to have to make a separate index entry for each and every page. Instead, you can specify one index entry and choose a range of pages in the Type pop-up menu. There are nine page-range choices in the Type pop-up menu, plus six more cross-reference choices. We cover those last six in “Cross References (X-Refs),” later in the chapter.
In the previous edition, an online reviewer chastised us (thereby taking food away from our hungry children) for our failure to explain in detail when and why we might use each of these index entries. We admit that we thought it was self-evident.
We still think so. You, the indexer, know the text. Knowing the text means that you understand that a given topic covers a specific range of pages or paragraphs (you’d use the For Next # of Pages option or the For Next # of Paragraphs option), or runs from one heading to another (you’d use the To Next Use of Style option and choose the paragraph style of the heading).
• Current page, the default page range, indexes the page that includes the index marker.
• To Next Style Change tells InDesign to index from the paragraph containing the index marker to the next paragraph style change.
• To Next Use of Style is the option we use most often. This indexes from the paragraph containing the index marker to the next use of a specific style, which you can choose in a pop-up menu next to the Type pop-up menu. For instance, let’s say you’ve got a book about farm animals where each animal’s heading is tagged with a paragraph style called “Heading-A.” You could select the heading “Rabbit” and set the Type to “To Next Use of Style.” Then you could choose Heading-A from the pop-up menu of styles. If the “Horse” section starts three pages after the Rabbit section, the page range in the index will span three pages; if it starts 14 pages after, the page range will span 14 pages, and so on.
• To End of Story tells InDesign to index from the paragraph containing the index marker to the end of the current story. Note that InDesign assumes that the story falls on every page. If your story starts on page 1, then skips to page 9, and ends on page 12, the index will display pages 1–12, ignoring the skipped pages.
• To End of Document is the same as To End of Story, but it spans from the paragraph containing the index marker to the end of the file. In the example of the farm animals chapter, you could index the entire chapter by placing the cursor anywhere on the first page of the chapter, specifying an index entry labeled “Farm animals,” and choosing To End of Document.
• To End of Section is the same as the previous two options, but the page range extends from the index marker to the end of the current section (see Chapter 2, “Page Layout”).
• For Next # of Paragraphs works when you know exactly how many paragraphs you want indexed. Unfortunately, currently InDesign only spans to the beginning of the final paragraph, rather than the end of the paragraph—a problem if that paragraph spans two pages.
• For Next # of Pages indexes from the index entry marker for the number of pages you specify.
• Suppress Page Range. Some first-level index entries don’t include page numbers at all. For instance, in the book we’ve been discussing, “Animals” is too broad a topic to include page numbers (every page in the book would be indexed). So you might specify Suppress Page Range for this one entry, and then follow it with 15 second-level entries, each with appropriate page numbers listed. (Again, we discuss second-level entries later.)
6. After you’ve chosen the scope from the Type menu, click OK and InDesign adds the index entry to the Index panel, along with the page range. If the indexed text sits on a master page or on the pasteboard, the master page label or “PB” shows up in the Index panel, but these items will not actually appear in the final index.
Figure 8-12 Adding an Index Entry
If you’re happy with the default settings of the New Page Reference dialog box, you can streamline this process significantly by selecting a word or phrase on your page and typing Ctrl-Alt-Shift-[ or Command-Option-Shift-[, which adds the selection to the index, skipping the dialog box. Or, if the selection is a proper name, press the ] (right bracket) instead—that indexes the selection based on the last word in the selection (so James Joyce would show up as Joyce, James). You can control how words in a proper name show up by placing a nonbreaking space between them; for instance, if you put a nonbreaking space between “King” and “Jr.,” then this keyboard shortcut will index the name under King instead of Jr.
Add and Add All
You may already have spotted the Add and Add All buttons in the New Page Reference dialog box. Clicking the Add button adds the index entry but leaves the dialog box open so that you can add more entries. This is very helpful—you frequently need to index the same text using more than one entry.
Add All searches throughout your document for every instance of the index entry and adds it automatically to the index. If you select the word “Bee” on your page and then click Add All, InDesign places another identical index entry at each instance of the word “Bee” in your file. (If you have turned on the Book option in the Index panel, InDesign also adds all instances of the index entry in other documents, too—as long as those documents are open.)
When you click Add All, InDesign uses the same scope (Type) settings for every instance of the entry text. Whether this is a great feature or a potential problem depends on the formatting of your index. If each instance of an indexed topic needs special attention (this one only showing up on this page, the next one using a To Next Use of Style scope, and so on), you should avoid this feature.
You also need to be careful with Add All because it only finds exact matches. That is, if you type “Cow” in the New Page Reference dialog box and then click Add All, InDesign won’t find “Cows” or even “cows”.
Cross-References (X-Refs)
As you build an index, think of all the ways that your reader might look for a topic and include those words in your index. For instance, because you’re familiar with your own book, you might include an index entry called “Llamas.” However, another reader might look for “Cute wool-producing animals that spit.” Fortunately, InDesign lets you add cross-references in your index such as “Spitting animals. See Llamas” and “Wool 34–46. See also Llamas.”
To add a cross-reference to your index, you go through the same steps as you would to add a normal index entry. The one difference is that you set the Type pop-up menu to one of the six cross-reference settings: See [also], See, See also, See herein, See also herein, and Custom Cross-Reference. When you select any of these, InDesign provides a text field in which you can enter the cross-referenced word or phrase. If you want your index entry to be “Koi. See Carp” you would type “Koi” in the first Topic Levels field, and type “Carp” in the Referenced field (see Figure 8-13).
• See is generally used when an index entry has no page number references, such as “Supermarket. See Grocery.”
• See also is used when an index entry does have page references, but you also want to refer the reader to other topics, such as “Grocery 34–51. See also Farmer’s Market.”
• We like the See [also] option best, because it uses either See or See also, depending on whether you’ve specified page references.
• See herein is a special case in which you are cross-referencing to a second-level entry within the same entry as the cross-reference itself, and it’s used more in legal indexes than anywhere else.
• If you choose Custom Cross-Reference, you can type any kind of cross-reference you prefer, such as “Hey dude, go look at page”.
Figure 8-13 Adding a Cross-Reference
Note that if you’re cross-referencing to an index entry that you’ve already added to your index, you can find that entry in the list of entries at the bottom of the dialog box and drag it to the Referenced field. That’s certainly faster (and probably more accurate) than typing the words again.
Because no page number is involved in a cross-reference, it doesn’t matter where in your document you specify it (though it must be in a text frame).
Some people prefer to put cross-references at the end of a list of second-level index entries rather than directly after the first-level entry. InDesign won’t do this for you automatically, but you can fake it by creating a dummy second-level entry (see “Adding a New Second-Level Index Entry,” below) and setting its Type to a cross-reference. The dummy second-level entry should just be named with “zzz” so that it automatically falls at the end of the alphabetized list of second-level entries. Later, once you build the index onto your document pages, you will have to perform a Find/Change to remove these symbols.
Adding a New Reference to an Entry
Once you’ve got an entry on your Index panel, you can easily add more page references to it. Let’s say you added the name “Farmer Jones” to your index back on page 13 of your document. Now, “Farmer Jones” appears again on page 51.
1. Place the cursor in the appropriate place in the text story. In this case, you’d probably put the cursor next to the word “Farmer” on page 51.
2. Click the entry in the Index panel. Here, you’d select “Farmer Jones.”
3. Alt/Option-click the New Entry button. Make sure that the Type pop-up menu is set up according to how you want your new reference to appear, and then click OK. If you want to use the default New Page Reference dialog box settings, you can just drag the index entry on top of the New Entry button instead.
Note that while you don’t necessarily have to click the entry in the Index panel in step 2 (you could just retype the entry in the New Page Reference dialog box or select it on the page), we recommend clicking because it ensures consistency. For example, if you relied on your typing ability, you might create the index entry “Chickens” and then later—meaning to type the same thing—create a new entry, “Chicken,” causing two different entries to be made when you only meant to make one.
Adding a New Second-Level Index Entry
Now that you’ve specified first-level index entries, you can—if you wish—add second-level entries. As we mentioned earlier, second-level entries are subcategories of the first-level entries. For example, under the first-level index entry “Grape Varieties,” you might find the second-level entries “Merlot,” “Chardonnay,” and “Syrah.” You can make a second-level index entry just as you would make the first-level index entry, but with two added steps.
After you open the New Page Reference dialog box, click the down arrow button to move your index entry to the second Topic Level field. Then, double-click the first-level entry in the list at the bottom of the dialog box (which enters it in the first Topic Level field).
Once you’ve created a second-level entry, you can place a third-level entry under it. Similarly, you can put fourth-level entries under third-level entries.
Importing Topics
Many people prefer to index their text in Microsoft Word before placing the text in InDesign. Fortunately, InDesign can import Word’s index markers, adding the index entries to the Index panel automatically. In fact, if you delete the Word file after importing it, the index topics remain in the Index panel. This is one good way to import a list of topics into the panel without having to type them manually in InDesign. Another way to import index topics is to choose Import Topics from the Index panel’s menu, which lets you select any other already-indexed InDesign document.
Index entries in your panel that don’t have corresponding index markers in the text won’t show up in your final index. If you don’t want to see these topics in your Index panel, select Hide Unused Topics in the panel’s menu to them. To view the topics you’ve hidden, choose Show from the panel menu.
Deleting Entries
There are several ways to delete an entry from your index.
• To delete an entire entry, including all its page references, select it in the Index panel and click the Delete button. Note that this also deletes all the subcategories under it and their page references, too.
• To delete a single page reference, you can select it in the Index panel (click the gray triangle next to the index entry to display its page references) and click the Delete button.
• To remove a particular page reference in your index, delete the index marker. The marker is a zero-width character, but it is a character nevertheless. To view the character, choose Show Hidden Characters from the Type menu. To delete it, put the text cursor immediately after it (you may have to use the arrow keys to accomplish this) and press Backspace/Delete.
Editing Entries
We make mistakes, so it’s a good thing that InDesign gives us a way to edit our flubbed index entries. When you’re editing an index entry, you have to decide whether you want to edit the entry itself or a particular page reference of the entry.
Let’s say that halfway through indexing your document, you realize that the index entry “Martha Washington” should have been indexed as “Washington, Martha.” You can select the entry in the Index panel and choose Topic Options from the panel’s menu—or even faster, you can just double-click the entry. In this case, you’d change the first Topic Level field to “Washington, Martha,” and then click OK.
One of the most common entry edits is capitalizing an entry, so the folks at Adobe snuck a Capitalize feature into the Index panel’s menu. While this is nice, we wish there were a further option to change an entry to lowercase (useful for level 2 entries, which are usually set in lowercase). Maybe next version.
Editing References
You can also change the scope (type) or style of a particular page reference. For instance, let’s say the reference to Martha Washington on page 47 should have spanned nine paragraphs, but you accidentally set it to Current Page instead. To fix this, click the gray triangle next to the index entry; this displays the page references for the entry. Double-click the page reference that corresponds to the one you want to change (in this case, you’d double-click the number 47). Change the index entry options, and when done, press Return/Enter.
If you actually wanted the above reference to begin on page 48 instead of page 47, you have to select the entry, cut it to the Clipboard, and then paste it in the new location. Selecting entries can be difficult, so make use of the arrow keys and the Shift key.
Finding Entries
Know you indexed “bugs” as a second-level entry, but can’t remember which first-level entry it was under? Select Find from the Index panel’s menu to display the panel’s Find field. After typing “bugs” into the field, you can click the down arrow to see the next instance of this entry in your panel. (Or click the up arrow to see the previous instance.)
Sorting Entries
To control which language scripts (such as Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese Kana, and so on) you want included in your index, and in what order they should appear, choose Sort Options from the Index panel menu. For example, if you have indexed special symbols (such as π), and you want those to be listed at the end of the index, select Symbols and then click the down arrow button to move it below Roman.
Building the Index
You’ve reached the finish line—and it’s finally time to place your index on a document page so you can see it in all its glory. This is the fun part, because you can just sit back, choose Generate Index from the Index menu’s panel, and let InDesign do the work of collecting the index entries and page numbers for you. There is still one more dialog box you need to pay attention to: the Generate Index dialog box (see Figure 8-14).
Figure 8-14 Generate Index Dialog Box
The Generate Index dialog box presents a (somewhat bewildering) array of choices you need to make in order to get the index of your dreams. InDesign shows you a few controls by default; you can see the others by clicking More Options. Fortunately, once you make your choices in this dialog box, InDesign will remember them the next time you build an index for this document.
Title. Fill in a name for your index in the Title field. InDesign places this title at the beginning of the list, so you might want to type “Index” or “My Indexio Grandioso” or something like that. We leave this field blank and make our own titles. If you do include a title, choose a paragraph style for it from the Style pop-up menu to the right of the Title field. (InDesign automatically adds a paragraph style called “Index Title” to your document when you open this dialog box, but you don’t have to use that style if you don’t want to.)
Replace Existing Index. InDesign knows when you’ve already built an index in a document, and it automatically replaces that index with a new one unless you turn off the Replace Existing Index option. Probably the only time you’d turn this off would be if you wanted to compare two indexes to find differences between them.
By the way, note that when InDesign replaces one index with another, it doesn’t just replace the text. It actually deletes all the index pages and then rebuilds them from scratch. If you’ve spent two hours adding extra formatting to the index, or adding boxes or lines to the pages, those additions are removed when you build the new index.
Include Book Documents. If your document is part of a book (see “Books,” earlier in this chapter), you can choose to build an index for the book by turning on the Include Book Documents option. Note that InDesign can generate the index from all the documents even if they’re not currently open, as long as they’re available in the Book panel (not missing or opened by someone else on the network).
Include Entries on Hidden Layers. If you have multiple layers in your document, you can choose whether to include the text on those layers even when the layers are hidden. While it’s rare that you’d turn this on, you might do so if you have made a layer that contains keywords or explanatory text that you want in the index but don’t want in print (see “Using Dummy Text for Lists,” earlier).
Nested versus Run-In. There are two primary types of index formats: nested and run-in (see Figure 8-15). In a nested index, each entry occupies its own paragraph; in a run-in index, the second-level entries merge with their first-level entry to form one big paragraph. Which you choose is entirely up to you, though it should depend in part on the content of the index. Run-in indexes make no sense when you have third- or fourth-level entries. On the other hand, run-in indexes typically conserve space, especially when they’re set in wide columns (because more than one entry fits on a single line).
Figure 8-15 Nested and Run-in Index Formatting
Include Index Section Headings. In this context, “section” doesn’t have anything to do with page numbering sections (which we discuss in Chapter 2, “Page Layout”). Rather, the section heads refer to index sections: “A”, “B”, “C”, and so on. Even when you turn on Include Index Section Headings, InDesign only includes the headings for which you have made index entries. If you have no entries that begin with “b”, the index won’t include a “B” section heading. If you really want the empty sections, you can turn on the Include Empty Index Sections check box. We’re not sure why you’d want to do that, but it’s nice to know you can.
Level Style. The Level Styles section of the Generate Index dialog box lets you apply a paragraph style to each entry in the index. In a run-in index, there’s only one kind of paragraph: the first-level entry (all the second-level entries are merged into the same paragraph). In a nested index, however, each entry level is tagged with its own paragraph style. If you want all your second-level index entries to be slightly indented from the first-level entries (you probably do), make a new style that includes indentation, and choose it from the Second Level pop-up menu.
Once again, designing a readable index is as much an art as a science. Take some time to peruse other people’s indexes, checking for details such as indentation (what does a first-level entry do when it’s longer than one line, for example?) and punctuation.
Note that InDesign builds styles for you called “Index Level 1”, “Index Level 2”, and so on. If you haven’t already created your own styles, then use these and adjust their definitions in the Paragraph Styles panel later.
Index Style. One of our favorite things about making indexes in InDesign is that we can apply paragraph or character styles to every index element, down to the page numbers and the cross-reference words (such as “See” or “See also”). By assigning styles, you can later make global changes to the look and feel of the index by changing the style definitions. While we often apply styles in the Section Heading and Cross-reference pop-up menus, we usually leave the Page Number and Cross-referenced Topic settings alone. It all depends on the index.
Entry Separators. Index formatting is as varied as art directors’ whims—or the whims of the indexers, which tend to be even more obscure. One of the main differences revolves around the incredibly picayune art of choosing punctuation. Do you want an en dash between numbers in a page range or a hyphen? An en dash is more appropriate, but the ends of the dash bump up against some numbers. Fortunately, you can type thin spaces on each side of the en dash in the Page Range field in the Generate Index dialog box. (Actually, we never type these characters themselves; we just select them from the menu to the right of the field.)
You can change the punctuation for Following Topic, Between Entries (which only applies in run-in indexes or where there are multiple cross-references per line), Page Range, Between Page Numbers, Before Cross-reference, and Entry End (see Figure 8-16).
Figure 8-16 Specifying Entry Separators
Putting It Together
The Book, Table of Contents, and Indexing features in InDesign go a long way toward making the process of creating long documents more bearable. Whether you’re building a magazine, a book, a journal, a catalog, or even a newsletter, we’re sure you’ll be able to find good use for these features. Remember that a little work up front—building styles, putting documents in a Book panel, and so on—can go a long way to saving lots of time in the long run.