I’m wondering if what Tia is looking for is “margin headings”… that is, headers that sit to the left of text.

We did this with our book Real World InDesign and it’s a wonderful effect and great use of the margin space. However, it’s generally very time-consuming because it requires putting the text headings in their own text frame and then anchoring that frame inside the larger story and positioning it with an object style, etc.

Not sure about the status of IndexUtilities. I’ll ask them to chime in.

Another option could be
https://www.indiscripts.com/category/projects#

I would suggest doing some post-processing with find/change. For example, find all the bullets and replace with a carriage return.

I always like nested styles! But if you had dozens or hundreds of frames, that might take a long time to do manually.

You could also do a GREP find/change and search for \A\w{4} and apply the formatting in the find/change dialog box. That code means “first four letters” of a story.”

You could even add that code to a grep style inside your paragraph style and it would only apply the character style formatting to the first four of the story.

It’s not this issue, is it, Tom?
https://indesignsecrets.com/the-source-of-the-mysterious-_goback-bookmark-and-how-to-get-rid-of-it.php