Welcome
Welcome to Michèle’s Indexes plugin, designed to transform HTML-like index tags into InDesign indexes.
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General information
Plugin name: Indexes
Version: 1.0.0 – 8/18/26
Fee: US$99.99 – includes minor updates until major version release
Availability: Adobe Marketplace
Status: not yet published
Source code in book: Adobe InDesign Automation of Nonfiction Books via JavaScript
Requirements
The tags based indexing algorithm relies on two tag types: one for page-index entries <idx> tags and one for referral-index entries <also> tags. These tags are two-level topic/subtopic pairs. The page-index tags looks as follows: <idx>topics[A]subtopic</idx>. The referral-index tags look the same, replace idx with also.
Running this plugin imposes no particular requirements except that tags should be formed as described above. I do have one suggestion though: It is preferable from manuscript readability and algorithmic processing perspectives to place idx tags in the beginning of paragraphs, not inside paragraphs and if possible away from chapter and section headers.
Since the author may insert many tags (3000+ in my InDesign automation book), the likelihood of typos is high. It is preferable to run the BadTags plugin first and fix issues before running the Indexes plugin.
What it does
The Indexes plugin processes page-index tags <idx> and referral-index tags <also> separately. It does the <also> first to get them out of the way; this liberates a lot of space; 500 tags means 10 pages less to shuffle around as each tag occupies one or more lines. After acquiring the tags, it cycles through them to create InDesign page-indexes and referral-indexes and removes the tags. Superficially there is not much to it.
After running the Indexes plugin , open the InDesign Indexes Pane and click on the Generate icon in the bottom of the pane to create an index table. Place the cursor in a two columns page while simultaneously pressing on the shift key to paste contents in Autoflow mode; InDesign will create as many pages as required to get all the index entries in. My InDesign automation book‘s hardcover edition index table is 36 pages long. InDesign professional services time saved is huge. Try to imagine what it would have cost you to do it all manually. Icing on the cake, the author is free to add as many indexes as he/she sees fit. InDesign professional services ceases to be an issue.
Restrictions: The Indexes plugin requires 30+ minutes to process the 3000+ indexes of my InDesign automation book. If your document contains many indexes, be patient.
Please note that a dialog box displays the HOMEDIR full path to enable the plugin user find the IndexesReadme.txt file.
For more information
You will find source code in my InDesign automation book so that you could roll your own ImageProcessing plugin.
For information on other plugins please go back to my InDesign Automation page plugins section.
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