Index: Ignore Insignificant Words

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.

An index should be sorted while ignoring insignificant words, such as (in English) the, a, an, and, in, on, etc. It’s straightforward to create sort strings for topic names in which the initial insignificant words have been removed.

Use

The script looks for a plain-text file that lists the insignificant words, one word on each line. This text file must be named insignificant-words.txt and must be placed in the InDesign document’s folder. If you target a book, open all book files, then run the script.

The script has no interface. It reads the word list, then processes the open InDesign documents. It first checks whether a topic name has a sort order string applied. If that’s the case, that string is processed, otherwise the sort-order field is filled with the topic name without the initial insignificant words.

The check on insignificant words is cumulative, by which I mean that if two or more insignificant words appear at the start of a topic name, they’re ignored. Thus, for the tpic name In the Heat of the Night the sort order is set as Heat of the Night.

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