Editing indexes in Microsoft Word

As you may know, I'm working on a new book: Writing for Science Journals will distill 25+ years of experience into a comprehensive guide to everything I know about journal writing. Barring a few layout tweaks, this will weigh in at ca. 420 pages plus front matter. Oof!

This includes a ca. 25-page index, since I've tried to be thorough about providing readers with easy access to the contents when they return to use the book as a reference. I've used the built-in indexing features ("embedded indexing") provided by InDesign, which are crap -- but still easier than index cards or their computer equivalent. The tools were clearly designed by someone who didn't understand what indexers do and how they do it. The tools won't even let you display a comprehensive index file that shows all the terms you've already selected in all chapters and lets you edit them in all chapters in a single keystroke. All you see is the index terms for the chapter or chapters you currently have open. There are workaround, but they're ugly. Kerntiff Publishing Systems offers a suite of indexing utilities that look promising. Wish I'd known about them before I'd started this book; they're far more affordable than the other available software, and would have eased the editing task.

In any event, using InDesign's indexing tools leads to the creation of a large number of inconsistencies (because you can't see what you've done in other chapters) and missing synonyms, which means a large amount of editing is required to correct inconsistencies and add missing synonyms. Doubly so if you don't create indexes regularly. I received really good training from one of the best in the biz (Lori Lathrop), but I simply don't do the work often enough to keep my skills sharp. Editing large indexes is a painful and tedious process at the best of times, but greatly exacerbated when the tools provided by the software don't support this work in any useful way.

The result is you have two choices: you can work very slowly and awkwardly in InDesign, or work on paper. If you work in a chapter file that contains the index generated by InDesign, you can insert a marker everywhere you need to stop editing and check whether you've used a term consistently elsewhere and whether a synonym is present, then wear out your PageDown or Find keys to move through the file. But you still can't copy any changes automatically into the Indexing tools palette, and unless you buy InCopy, you don't have access to revision tracking. Printing is easier, since you can see all the text at a glance, rather than seeing the limited subset that is visible in a cramped window on the screen. I thought I was clever by printing the pages and taping them together in 6-page by 2-page spreads, thereby eliminating something like 90% of the page flipping. And indeed, this worked surprisingly well. But the work was still tedious and difficult.

Then I had an inspiration: Why not used the damnèd computer to make the work easier? A good night's sleep provided inspiration for a more efficient solution based on Microsoft Word. The following will seem complicated until you grasp the logic, but it's fairly straightforward: you'll be using Word's find and replace tools, combined with revision tracking, to annotate the index text in ways that make your corrections easy to see and transfer into InDesign. Here's the outline of how this works:

Use InDesign's Index palette to generate an index. Copy the text out of the InDesign file containing the index, and paste it into Word. Save the file somewhere obvious so you can find it again.

Do a global search and replace with the following pattern: in the "find what" field, type a space followed by ^#, and in the "replace with" field, type ^t^&. In English: "find all spaces followed by a number and replace them with a tab followed by the same text you just found. I'll explain the reason for this step later in the description.

Do a second global search and replace to find ^t followed by a space, and replace this with ^t. This eliminates the space after the tab created by the first search and replace.

Turn on revision tracking and edit the index. When you need to stop and check for consistency or see whether a synonym is present, type a bookmark. Use the macro in my onscreen editing book to automatically copy selected text into the Find dialog and move to the next instance of similar text so you can check the complete phrase for consistency; if you expect different wording (e.g., Finding/Text versus Text/Finding), search for that wording instead. If you don't find the search term, you may need to create a synonym. When you're done, use the macro in my book to return quickly to the bookmark in a single keystroke so you can resume editing.

When you're done, you'll have a list of tracked changes followed by page numbers. The numbers let you return to InDesign, open the relevant chapter file, and make your changes in the Index palette. There are a couple ways to do this. First and most efficient, turn off revision tracking, and prepare the text for conversion into a table so that you can sort the entries. If you have many headings in the index (e.g., "Abbreviations" as a heading, followed by "in the Abstract" as the entry followed by a page number), you'll need to deal with these. There's a crude way to do this, which I'll propose while I look for a more elegant way: First, you'll want to add a meaningless page number after the heading so that Word will understand that you also want to convert the heading into a line in the table. To do so, search for ^$^p (any letter followed by a return character = a heading with no trailing page number), and globally replace it with ^&^t3^p (= the same letter at the end of the heading but followed by a tab character and a number before the return character). Second, to remove any unnecessary return characters that have been added by that first step, search for ^p^t (a return followed by a tab) and replace it with ^t (just the tab).

To create the table, select all the text, and use Word's "convert to table" feature (under the Table menu), to turn the index text into a 2-column table. This lets you use the magic of the Sort function (also under the Table menu) to sort the table based on the values in the second column of the table (the page numbers) in ascending order. This lets you work through the chapters, dealing with index markers on one page at a time, until you've fixed all the index entries.

Second, and more tediously but possibly more easily for some, don't bother converting the file to a large table. Instead, just work through the edited file one correction at a time, opening and closing the necessary InDesign chapter files as you work. You can make this slightly more efficient by searching for page numbers, one at a time moving from page 1 to the last page in the book (ca. 420 in my case), but that's a lot of searching; your fingers will grow awfully tired by the time you've done this.

There are undoubtedly improvements that can be made, which I'll explore as time permits. But this approach seems to work much better than either editing on paper or using InDesign's tools.