Skip Style: Format First Lines in Index Sections

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.

Take this list:

aardvark
ape
bear
beaver
cat
cheetah
cricket

The script applies a named paragraph style to all paragraphs whose first letter changes from that in the previous one. In this example, that would be bear and cat. The result would be this:

aardvark
ape

bear
beaver

cat
cheetah
cricket

You get this result by creating the paragraph style index_skip based on the level-1 index style and adding some space before.

You can add section letters so that the list would look like this:

aardvark
ape

B
bear
beaver

C
cat
cheetah
cricket

When you opt to insert headings (A, B, etc.), the paragraph style is applied to them.

Use

The script expects a paragraph style called index_skip. To change this, look for this line in the script:

var skip_style = 'index_skip';

and change index_skip to the name of the paragraph style you want to use. To have the script insert section headings, set insert_letter to true.

To run the script, select a story in the usual way (select a text frame or an insertion point in a story) and run the script from InDesign’s Scripts panel.

The script has no interface.

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