Index Fixes: Sorting

InDesign’s index supports language-specific sorting quite well in that sorting idiosyncracies in each supported language are honoured and diacritics are sorted according to the rules of each language.

However, a problem is that InDesign doesn’t distinguish letter-by-letter and word-by-word sorting, it supports only letter-by-letter sorting. And the problem with that is that InDesign ignores all commas and spaces, applying an extreme (and ill-conceived) version of letter-by-letter sorting. In an index with many commas, as in an index of names, this leads to very bad results.

The following list was posted by a baffled user in Adobe’s InDesign user-to-user forum many years ago:

Li Bassi, A.
Li, C.
Liebers, J.
Li, G.N.
Li, J.
Li, J.F.
Li, K.
Lima, C.J.
Li Mora, A.
Lim, C.S.
Lim, S.C.
Linfield, E.H.
Lin, Z.-D.
Li, P.W.
Li, R.
Lis, T.
Li, S.W.

A list of names, each surname followed by a comma and initials. InDesign’s letter-by-letter sort ignores commas, which leads to this very badly sorted list It should be sorted as follows: first all the Lis together, then the names that start with Li.

Li, C.
Li, G.N.
Li, J.
Li, J.F.
Li, K.
Li, P.W.
Li, R.
Li, S.W.
Li Bassi, A.
Liebers, J.
Lim, C.S.
Lim, S.C.
Lima, C.J.
Li Mora, A.
Lin, Z.-D.
Linfield, E.H.
Lis, T.

Whether Li Bassi and Li Mora should be sorted as they are shown here or whether they should be sorted together immediately after the block of Lis is a matter of debate, but both can be handled.

Fortunately it’s fairly simple to influence the way that topics are sorted. The correct sort order can be set as follows: duplicate the topic name in the sort-order field and replace the comma with a 0 (a zero).

Naturally, setting all those sort orders manually is not an option, and fortunately this is very easy to script:

(function () {
  var t = app.documents[0].indexes[0].allTopics;
  for (var i = 0; i < t.length; i++) {
    t[i].sortOrder = t[i].name.replace (',', '0');
  }
}());

Save this script in InDesign’s Scripts folder and run it with a document open. For details on installing scripts, see here.

In the name index shown above, with the sort-order fix applied, all names are sorted letter-by-letter. I’ll repeat a fragment here:

Li, S.W.
Li Bassi, A.
Liebers, J.
Lim, C.S.
Lim, S.C.
Lima, C.J.
Li Mora, A.

But it might be clearer for the reader to group Li Bassi and Li Mora together after the Lis. In effect you sort those two names word-by-word, and indeed the Chicago Manual of Style mentions that though letter-by-letter sorting is preferred, indexes often end up with a mix of sorting strategies.

The fragment with the to open compound Lis, so to speak, sorted word-by-word, looks as follows:

Li, S.W.
Li Bassi, A.
Li Mora, A.
Liebers, J.
Lim, C.S.
Lim, S.C.
Lima, C.J.

The only additional change in the sort orders is to replace the spaces after Li with the letter A:

(function () {
  var t = app.documents[0].indexes[0].allTopics;
  for (var i = 0; i < t.length; i++) {
    t[i].sortOrder = t[i].name
      .replace (',', '0')
      .replace (' ', 'A');
  }
}());

Further refinements are usually needed. Some will be systematic, in which case you can script them, while others are not very predictable, in which case you’ll have to apply them manually. The latter will be few in number, most probably.

Note: If you manually edit a generated index and need to resort it, you can use Marc Autret’s SmartSort script.

Return to Index Fixes page.

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