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• • November 13, 2013 at 12:35 am #66178
    Tom Herbst

    Member

    Hi All,

    I am new here, although I have been listening to the podcast for several years. Here’s my question:

    I am preparing a two-volume book to publish with Createspace, and I need help creating a unified index. Each volume has page numbers running from 1 to (approximately) 400. I would like to include an (identical) index for the entire thing in each volume, with entries to indicate both the volume and page number, for example like this:

    Tree, pine I-37, I-256, II-97, II-234 (etc.)

    I do not want to change the page numbering scheme within each book from standard numbering – the only place that “I” for volume 1 and “II” for volume 2 should appear is in the index (I already have literally hundreds of mentions in the text of page references like this: see page 347 or see page 92 of Volume II…).

    My original (not so brilliant) idea was to temporarily combine the two volumes into a single large book, and then start the page numbering for Volume 1 at 1000 and that for Volume 2 at 2000. After creating the index, I would use grep replace to fix the index and plug it into the two correctly-numbered original books. The problem with this scheme is that numbers above 1000 cause typesetting changes that mess up the layout.

    Thanks for any help with this. By the way, I am using CS5…

    FaceTable

  • December 6, 2013 at 11:09 pm #66368
    Michael Roberts

    Member

    I do not think this (Tree, pine I-37, I-256, II-97, II-234) is a good thing to do ! .. It will mislead your book readers. I think it is better to put each index individually in each book and no need to combine the 2 indexes together since the 2 book volumes are in separate books.

  • December 7, 2013 at 8:34 am #66369
    Tom Herbst

    Member

    Thanks for the response, Michael. It is indeed a single book split across two volumes. There are too many pages to publish it in one physical volume. Also, Createspace insists that every volume they print starts on page 1 (I tried to have continuous numbering and a single unified index – so that volume 2 starts on page 431, for example – but the Createspace proofreading robot refused it).

    I really do need to do what I asked about.

    Thanks,
    FaceTable

  • December 7, 2013 at 10:44 am #66372
    Michael Roberts

    Member

    Hmmm .. I have seen a lot of book that were too long so the author normally divides it into 2 or more volumes, each volume starts at page “1”. If you insist on doing this i might suggest you take a look at the program “PDF Index Generator”. This program helps in creating your book index, but the most useful feature in your case is that it is very elastic in defining the book pages numbers, whether they are Arabic, Latin, … pages numbers or any other format you want to use. You can watch the beginning of their video tutorial to see how this works :
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY3PEl5rXNE

    I wish that gives you a good start.

  • December 8, 2013 at 2:55 pm #66377
    Michael Roberts

    Member

    Tom ,

    Today i was checking the Chicago Manual Of Style, and i have noticed their index: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/indexA.html
    You can see they are setting the chapter number + dot + the page number for each indexed word.

    ex: indexing as responsibility of, 2.2, 2.67, 16.3–4, 16.104, 16.108

    You can do the same thing for your volumes index, but don’t use “I-256” as in your examples. Instead use a dot as a separator “I.256” as “-” should be used in a range of pages, like: I.256-I.263.

    I thought i should share this with you.

  • July 8, 2017 at 2:44 pm #95945
    Michael Minkoff

    Member

    This is a very old thread, but I figured out a way to do this, so I thought I would share.

    First, you want to put your volume documents into a single “book” document (through the “Book” panel), so that you can index them and view meta-entries in all volumes simultaneously. Once both (or more) documents are in the book, you can index them at the same time by clicking “Book” in the index panel.

    You still run into the problem of having potentially duplicate numbers in your single index. You can fix this by adding a “Section Prefix” unique to each volume. Open up the “Document Numbering Options” for each section of a given volume. In your case, you would want the Section Prefix to be “I.” for volume 1, “II.” for volume 2, etc. Make sure to select “Include Prefix when Numbering Pages.” It is true that this will change the way your page numbers look on the pages of your book. But don’t worry about that right now.

    After you finish compiling your index, generate it with “Book” toggled on in the Index panel. In the “Generate Index” dialogue box, make sure to select “Include Book Documents.” This will generate a single index for all documents, and it will automatically ensure that all of your index entries have the right prefix.

    After you have generated/placed your finished index and formatted and proofed it to your standards, go back to the Numbering options for each of your documents and de-select “Include Prefix when Numbering Pages.” This will remove the prefix from your printed pages, but your index will remain as it was generated (and the metadata in your index will also still reflect the multiple volumes).

    This probably won’t help you, since this question has been unanswered for a few years. But maybe it will help someone else. Cheers!

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