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.
Comments
Silkjaer wrote:
This is of course only one of many possibilities with AppleScript - I'd love to write some more small scripts if you have any suggestions!
Anne-Marie Concepcion wrote:
Wow this is great, I'll try it out!
Could the colors be applied via a Character style? Then in InDesign, after you run the script, you could just delete the character style and apply "none" at the prompt, no?
AM
Silkjaer wrote:
Anne-Marie: Thanks. It should be possible, yes - but if you were to do the same task with character styles, I would modify the script to find things with a specific character style instead of finding a colour.
I use colours to avoid using character styles, mainly because of the situations where a word has to be indexed, already has another character style.
Normally I just create a new swatch, call it "index", apply it, and search/replace it with "Black" in the end, or just change the colour of the swatch to black.
Olaf Nelson wrote:
I'm thinking there must be a way to use this when the author/editor who will do the colorizing doesn't have InCopy. I keep getting into a situation where I complete the layout and then give it back to the author for indexing. Often, they highlight all the words and phrases for the index in Word, then send me that list to format as an index. If they then want me to search for every occurrence of each term and compile the index, I charge extra. If they do the searching themselves in the PDF, I don't. It would be cool to streamline the process by using this script, or one very much like it, but I'll have to think about how to do that when they only have Word. Anyone have suggestions? I haven't thought about it much yet, so maybe I'm missing an obvious answer that will occur to me as soon as I click the submit button. I also don't know Word that well, so am not sure what it can do.
Thanks for all the great tools.
Olaf
Silkjaer wrote:
Dear Olaf,
I too are often placed in the same position, which is why I try to work with returning clients in InCopy as much as possible. If not, I find it easiest for them to highlight words with a marker on paper, and mail me a copy to manually add - bringing Word into the game after it has been converted once is deadly in my opinion ;)
Alternatively I suggest editors to mark up index words in Word prior to the InDesign conversion, since they are imported as well - often with small, but fixable, errors.
Searching and adding index words from a list will often find to many occurrences of a word, and just make a huge job of cleaning up extra index words in the end.
Vitor Vicentini wrote:
Hi Thomas
This is a great “missing” tool! Congratulation!
Do you mind if I post a not in my InDesign Brazilian blog (http://indesignbrasil.blogspot.com/)?
The idea of Anne-Marie Conception is very good too, an index entry from character style.
Thanks for all the tools.
Vitor Vicentini
Silkjaer wrote:
Vitor: Thank you! You're very welcome to post on your blog.
The script is quite easily changed to use character styles, but I prefer colours ... As I write in the post: "... but since I'd like to enable marking up that already have a character style applied, I found swatches better suited."
Vitor Vicentini wrote:
Hi, Thomas.
I put a note about your script in my blog http://indesignbrasil.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Vitor
Betinho Silva wrote:
Good Script thx
Leyson Mattos wrote:
Tak Thomas! Genial
Elvissan wrote:
Hi Thomas
The text was translated into English by Google tool, I hope you understand well.
A member of the InDesign community Orkut had problems with the script and asked for help. And so I found this site. I saw the script and found the very good idea. Incidentally, congratulations!
I work with Windows so I do not know the Mac has some difference regarding the execution of the script (though it is Java and runs on both).
Problems encountered:
The dialog is not erased from memory after the script was run. If you use again, it will be a memory.
When running the script, you see the dialog box of options to choose the color, a condition was not imposed if the action is canceled (ie pushing the cancel button, the action starts the same way).
Has no warning message if the selected color is not present in the document text, as you can know before you perform the search. (This last problem is what causes more errors in the script, imagine you try to add something that the index does not exist).
That's what I wrote are small things compared to your great idea.
Again congratulations.
Elvissan
kerry wrote:
Hi there,
Can I use this script in InDesign CS3?
Thanks
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