Creating Multiple Indexes in InDesign

When you need to make more than one index in a single document, you need to resort to workarounds.

Nicholas wrote:

How do you create multiple indexes in InDesign from the same book? For example, a subject index, an author index, etc.

I wish I could just tell you that there was an easy answer for this — just click the “multiple index” feature. But no. Instead, you have to rely on workarounds to get more than one index out of InDesign.

The easiest method (in my opinion) is to apply character styles to the words and phrases that you want indexed, and then use the IndexMatic script to create the index based on that style. It can do its magic on all documents in a book if you have all those documents open when you run the script.

Another method is to use prefixes in your index entries. For example, put an ! (exclamation point) at the beginning of all your “author” index entries. Then, when you generate the index, those will all be gathered together in one group. You can then remove the special character at the beginning of each paragraph easily with Find/Change.

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This article was last modified on December 20, 2021

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