Index: Number Style Overrides in Books

This script is part of the Indexes and Concordances collection. See the full collection here.  For more information about working with indexes and concordances in InDesign, see here.

This script is part of the Book Panel collection. See the full collection here. 

Number style overrides set in the New Page Reference dialog (or the Page Reference Options dialog) work fine when the document’s index is generated in the document: the selected character style (Principal reference in the screenshot) is applied to all the relevant page numbers.

However, when you generate the index in a separate document as part of a book file, the overrides are ignored: they aren’t applied in the book index. This script fixes that.

Use

The script has no interface, just run it from InDesign’s Scripts panel.

Open just one book file (scripts can’t tell which is the active book if two or more books are open). Generate the index in the index document as usual and save the index. You can have more than one index in the book – each in its own document, of course.

Run the script against the book. No documents need to be open, not even any index.

The script applies the requested character styles to all pages numbers in all indexes. When the script’s done the index document stays open, but it’s not saved.

Version history

23 Dec. 2025: Posted.

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