An Index Manager Add-On

Some software can be wonderful, some not so much. I’m a huge fan of Index Manager (IM) to do embedded indexing. I’ve been using the index-import add-on to IM recently. To say that I’m impressed and pleased is really an understatement since I tend to be cynical about how well much software works.

The problem

Just a little background as to why I was using the index-import function: I had an embedded index that had been subject to many revisions in rather elderly InDesign files. When the index was generated from the InDesign files, strange things happened: old entries showed up even though apparently deleted, and errors occurred in pagination, with some entries still showing up from the cleaned files until cleaned yet again.

After much discussion with the editors of the book, we decided that the best thing to do was to take the much-used files and completely strip all embedded entries, then use the final manually edited PDF index to re-embed the index entries into the “clean” InDesign files. That was going to be a nightmare because of the mammoth size of the index, but the thought of completely re-indexing the material was also daunting.

The solution

The resolution to my frustration came with a closer look at the capabilities of Index Manager: the index-import add-on to the basic program. It was possible to take that corrected index (with all the post-generation corrections), convert that to an MSWord document, which could then be converted to a txt file and imported into IM. I could have IM re-embed that index into the clean documents. Surely, that’s just a dream, right?

No, not a dream! After the appropriate file conversions, IM provided me with lots of information about possible anchor points for the index terms—lots of numbers. Now I know most of us indexers are word people, rather than number lovers, so I had a learning curve for interpreting the numbers that IM generated.

Once I got better at interpreting the numbers that IM generated and learned that I could actually trust the software, the process went quite well. By interpreting the scores and distance measures, I could select multiple entries and let IM re-enter them as a “batch.” The re-embedding was still a lot of work, but much easier than completely re-indexing.

Lessons learned

I definitely gathered some lessons learned during this process. First, you need pay close attention to the files that have been converted. These files had lots of Greek letters in the main entries. The conversion of the PDF files to MSWord files was no problem, but the subsequent conversion to txt files did have some flaws. The Greek characters did not convert well. I didn’t explore this before the conversion, but I’m quite sure that there’s a way to address the issue. Some characters were lost and some formatting was lost, completely due to me being a novice working with this add-on.

For this add-on to be truly efficient, I had to trust the software and learn to read the numbers. Even with the basic IM functions, it took me a while to feel comfortable editing 387 entries at the same time, but I did get comfortable with it. I am a software cynic so that trust was hard-won, but now it extends to the index-import function, too. I’d certainly use this again in an appropriate situation. As a novice user, I haven’t really tapped the capabilities of this add-on but it’s a wonderful addition to the tools we indexers have for embedded indexing.