It depends on your exact role in the book making industry …

1. Are you the writer?
2. Are you the publisher?
3. Are you 'just the technician'? ;)

Countdown:

Ad 3: That's me. I get a list of phrases (names, or individual words, or “the deconstruction of the Self in the Romantic Era”) and someone Up There says, “hey, I've heard you can make an index of these. Please do so, a.s.a.p.”. Only thing I can do is run a script that looks up each of the words in my ID file and adds an index entry for them. I recently got a comment “People with the same surname are concatenated into one entry. Also, the pages where they weren't mentioned by name are missing.” … 'Nuff said.

Ad 2: Erm. See above? Publishers seem convinced 'an' index — any one — is better than none. I tend to disagree, because …

Ad 1: Creating an Index is a skill. You definitely don't want a dumb 'list of words'. Proper indices contain 'see under' and 'see also' references; different word stems are concatenated into a single entry (where applicable). Names are in full, and appear as separate entries: “Thatcher, Margaret Hilda (British Prime Minister, 1979-1990) / Thatcher, Margaret (fictional character) / thatcher (occupation)”. If it's likely people would look up the 'wrong' word, synonyms ought to redirect them: “profession, see occupation”.

I usually state it's the author's responsibility to create an index, because s/he knows exactly what the book is about, what terminology is used, and where people may be looking for in an index. But Indexing is also a full-time occupation; there are people who are amazingly adept at it, even for works they didn't write!

Only after taking this into consideration, you should tackle the technologicalities, such as: how to properly enter an index entry into ID, how to add sub-topics and cross-references, how to edit existing entries … whilst keeping in mind all ID can do is create the “dumb” index! A Good index needs quite some additional work after that.

.. it doesn't seem very flexible to only include character styles by Adobe :/

But it's so much better than no GREP styles at all! It just should not be treated as a replacement for “Replace text” … ;)

It sure sounds this can be scripted, but for that the would-be scripter would more information … (As for volunteers, I, for one, am swamped at the mo' …)

There is no setting for an exact amount of space between the plain text and the first footnote, because:

1. Footnotes are always placed at the very bottom of the text frame.
2. The text above the footnote and the text inside the footnote may have a different leading.
3. Widow/orphan prevention may move one or more lines from the straight above the footnote to the next page.

Point (1) is totally beyond your control.

To counteract Point (2) you could make the leading for your footnote text the same as the leading for your main text. The leading needs to be the same. The only alternative is to have the same number of lines in all of your footnotes.

Point (3) can only be circumvented if you totally and utterly ignore all window and orphans in your text (which is, actually, frowned upon) and never use any blank line at all in your text (because that might end up right before a footnote), and — worse of all! — if you don't mind having a heading at the very bottom of a page … (because moving the heading to the top of the next page would leave a blank line above the footnote, and you don't want that).

As you can see — hopefully! –, these alternatives are way, way more ugly than having slightly different spacing between note and text. Absolutely nobody would noticed that, but having headings at the bottom of a page …

Just don't be bothered about this.

(Seems like a very cool text, though. Heavy Metal Rulez!)

It's not possible, GREP styles are meant to look for text patterns only.

It's easy to change the behavior to what you'd expect, though. “Next Page” & “Previous Page” can be found somewhere in the Keyboard Shortcut Editor.

(I'd tell you in what section, if I only could remember it — it was somewhere unexpected, I know that. Use the “Show Set” command to get a list of all commands, then search in there.)

Odd. d+/d+ appears to work just fine …

You really shouldn't be using your d+/d*, because that will match 1024/ — since the asterisk stands for zero or more characters … But perhaps the Opentype coding in your particular font is protecting you against this. The below image is Minion Pro:

You must keep in mind the “Fraction” Opentype feature isn't really strictly defined, and may well work quite good in one font (when done by a good Opentype-savvy designer) and not-at-all in other fonts. There are long discussions on 'how to write good Fraction code' on Typophile, but actually implementing all that code is left to the designer.

(Double backslashes show up as one. Be careful when editing, because then they'll be single ones and you'll have to double them before re-posting. I dunno about the images, I can upload one if I want to. It's possible David rigged that up for me ;-) )

The usual (recommended!) settings for plain text is to keep at least 2 lines together at the top and at the bottom. In this case, the last two lines of the paragraph on p. 9 are kept together on p. 11 (what happened to p. 10?). These two lines do not fit on the previous page because they both contain a footnote, and therefore there must be enough space at the bottom of p. 9 for those two lines plus their footnotes.

It seems you are not allowing to break footnotes across pages, which is commendable, but in this case shows it not always produces “nice” results.

It's also possible the keep options in the footnote's paragraph style prevents them from breaking.

Try this: drag out the bottom of the text frame on p. 9 until you see the text wrap into place. The amount you have to enlarge the text frame is what you should try to win, on this page or earlier, to get what you want.

David, that podcast was from 2008 — I just stumbled upon (™, no doubt) these “Notes on InDesign 2 as compared to FrameMaker 7“, which places it around 2002 AD:

11. There are convenient shortcuts for all types of navigation in tables: move to first/last cell in a column/row, add/delete row/col, etc. Also, you can add rows or columns to a table simply by option-dragging the table boundary.