InDesign CS3 Book Indexing Bug
As many people have discovered; InDesign CS3 does not index books properly. It will drop out some listings when created or updated and isn’t always obvious about it. This only seems to affect indexes of books and not documents. While Adobe is aware of the issue there’s not telling when it will actually get fixed. In the mean time we at InDesign Help would like to offer some work-arounds for this problem.
Solutions:
- Turn your InDesign CS3 book into a single document by using the InDesign CS3 book to document script. Keep in mind you can still keep your book, this merged document is only needed for indexing purposes.
- Merge your documents by hand
- Open up your book and all documents within your book
- Select the Pages Panel Fly-out menu and select move pages
- For ‘Move Pages’ select 1-(you last page) and choose to move them to either a newly created InDesign document or the first document of your book.
repeat this for every document in your book
- Export your documents to the InDesign Interchange (*.inx) format and index the book in InDesign CS2
If you’re currently working on a InDesign Book in CS2 you will probably want to finish your project before upgrading to CS3.
February 8th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Hello,
I am trying to generate an index for a long document, about 250 pages. The text was placed from a Word doc that had the index fields created in it.
When I tell InDesign to generate the index, I get this message:
“The index could not be generated. One or more index entries contain invalid characters. Please delete any invalid characters from the index entries.”
I tried generating indexes with two different documents and got the same error message for both. I have no idea how to locate the “invalid characters” and cannot find any info about this in the InDesign help files.
Do you have any ideas?
Thanks so much,
Dianna
February 9th, 2008 at 1:17 am
try deleting the entry separators.
February 18th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Thanks, Zervas. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. I also tried saving the word doc as rich text and placing it, but that didn’t work. I tried putting an index marker into the InDesign file to see if it looked different from the ones imported from word, and I noticed that InDesign placed the marker (a blue colon with an arrow under it) at the front of the index selection, whereas the ones that came from word had these symbols at the end of the index selection. Man, I am going crazy with this. Help!
February 22nd, 2008 at 7:13 am
I’m very frustrated with Indesign index. I spent a whole day creating index entries only to find that Indesign CS3 dropped all of them! Indesign seems rather unpredictable which entries to keep and which ones to drop. Could someone at Indexsign Help please kindly advise how to get the job done without having to use CS2? I’m working with .indd files as parts of a book. Many thanks in advance.
February 22nd, 2008 at 7:44 am
InDesign CS3, As shipped, doesn’t work well with book indexes. I’d recommend upgrading. If that doesn’t work let me know.
-zervas
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
How do I upgrade? I’m using CS3 Version 5.0. Thanks.
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Zervas, I’ve downloaded the Win 5.0.2 update and installed it but still have the same indexing problem.
Alex
March 5th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I have the same problem that Alex has. I have upgraded and to no avail. Nor can I get the book to document script to work.
May 20th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I have typeset a 340 page document that I have to index. The document is basically a list of chemicals that have to be indexed. The final generated index has about 5000 entries so is a huge job. I’ve done the document in InDesign CS3 but because of the problems with the index generating, when it was finished I saved it as an .inx format and generated the index from CS2. So far so good. Trouble is none of the cross references came across. I have done this job for the last 15 years (originally in Pagemaker) but since I have been doing it in InDesign I have had to key in the cross references (in my final typeset copy) because they don’t come through on the index palette. Some come across okay, but 90% of them don’t show at all. This time I have keyed them all into the cross reference palette box but can’t see any way of checking them, they don’t show up as a visible entry. When my client makes alterations to the cross references I can’t edit them, because I can’t see them. Can you help with any suggestions. This year the client has asked for the InDesign file to be converted to a Word doc, with all index entries included, but I don’t think the cross references are going to show if they generate an index. I would really appreciate any help because this has been a bugbear for years. Thanks. Appreciate the help.
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:42 am
Try importing your word document rather than cut and paste.
To import a text file:
1. If you want to import the text into an existing frame or type path, click in it. To flow text into the master text frame, press Command+Shift (Mac OS) or Ctrl+Shift (Windows) to select it. Otherwise, make sure no objects are selected.
2. Choose File > Place. Ask to show import options and make sure the box for index is checked.
3. To generate Index,
Window > Type and Tables > Index and the Index box will appear. Generate Index.
This worked well for me
June 13th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
I am generating an index for a book and in most cases where I have multiple pages for an entry, they do not come out when I generate the index. In cases where it does show more than one page reference, they come out in reverse order.
I do not have CS2, so can’t use the workaround described.