IndexMatic³ Review

Jeff Potter

This article appeared in Issue 19 of CreativePro Magazine.

Let’s get something out of the way right now: Indexing is an art as well as a science, a skill as disciplined and as specialized as editing or designing. Put more bluntly: If you have your sights set on clicking a button and generating an index in InDesign without exerting any effort, you’re destined to get a weird and crummy index.

It’s heartening that Marc Autret, developer of IndexMatic³, agrees. 

“A finding-and-matching program cannot extract concepts that are only implied in the text,” Autret writes in the PDF manual. “Without human intelligence—or AI!—it cannot detect all major topics wrapped in the document.”

IndexMatic³ automates what can be automated to create a useful index in a range of formats, but it doesn’t let you get away with not thinking hard about how words are used in your document. Automation is a helpful tool to perform essential indexing tasks, such as searching, filtering, counting, sorting, and formatting. Autret explains that those tasks “help reduce human intervention to what cannot be automated: understanding.”

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