I have read everything I can find searching for hours and hours about indexes and GREP usage. I found these very useful items for instance: https://creativepro.com/ind…..styles.php great video actually showing you how to apply GREP styles; GREP in InDesign 3 (still applicable to users of 5.5) by Michael Murphy at https://www.indesignusergroup.c…..murphy.pdf. He does a super job of explaining the different types of symbols and what they do, complete with formulas in multicolors with simple yet detailed explanation of just what each element in the formula does; a well as how to think about text so that you can come up with a formula that will accommodate variation. There is a rather complete list of Metacharacters for Searching at https://help.adobe.com/en_US/In…..6f59a.html . But the information on applying this technology to index formatting is sparse though I did find David Blatner’s https://creativepro.com/aut…..styles.php aimed at super and sub-scripts. But none of these exactly describe the steps needed to, for instance, get italics or sub/superscripts you already have typed into your text into your index. There are partial explanations which talk about adding code but do not tell us in what panel and space exactly to place that code, or if they do, the explanation is lacking details about implementation so that one can’t really get a handle on what is going on.
I'm not clear on: (1) whether codes that can later be used to do Find/Change on the generated Index story have to be applied to original text and then rendered somehow invisible, (2) orwhether the changes can all be made with a GREP style in the style applied to the index text. It seems clear that whether symbols such as <> are applied in the original text marked for indexing, or in the index text, they have to be hidden. And I have been unable to figure out the code to use and the exact steps to do it.
If anyone has done this I would GREATLY appreciate an explanation step by step, or at least the exact codes. In my case I would be taking italicized Latin names for plants (that do have a unique character style applied) into the index, and I want them italicized in the index. The form of the input is pretty clear: a bunch of letters-space-another bunch of letters (genus and species). You can easily apply brackets (<>) to items in the topic levels column of the New Page Reference dialogue box for the Index (and pasting the item without brackets in the Sort By makes certain the sort order isn't messed up by the < at the beginning). Then after selecting the Index text in my document, I input in Find What: <[lu]+s[lu]+> and in Change to: $1 $2 and in Change Format box, General, Italic . But I got stopped by its saying it finds no matches.
Not sure what to do next. This is not paid work for me, it is part of a layout for a plant book I am doing for my club, the Nevada Native Plant Society. (by the way, this site has helped me more than once!!) Any help would be everso much appreciated and thanks in advance.
.
