InDesign Tagged Index
When you create long-form documents in Adobe InDesign, the program's indexing features support your need to help readers find essential content quickly. InDesign's tagged-text options simplify text export so you can perform complex editing in an external application. InDesign's format codes mark up your text with the features you've applied to it, including type styling, tables and indexing, so you can reimport it into a layout without having to reformat it.
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InDesign Indexes
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An Adobe InDesign index consists of a list of topics, each with references to specific locations in your text. You can add codes to your text by hand to mark insertion points, words or longer stretches of text that constitute index references. You also can index one instance of a term and add all other instances of it with a single command. InDesign's "Find/Replace" dialogue box includes options to search for indexing codes, so you can find these hidden markers without revealing them first. If you prefer, you can make index codes visible along with other hidden marks, such as paragraph and line breaks.
InDesign Tagged Text
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Not to be confused with HTML and XML, which InDesign also supports, InDesign tagged text consists of formatted, coded text exported from a story -- a free-standing range of text -- in your layout file. InDesign's proprietary tagging language brackets each range of styled text in codes that delineate how it's styled, from style-sheet names and typographic parameters to index markers. Although other page-layout applications also feature their own tagging languages, InDesign only can read its own.
Creating Tagged Text
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Adobe InDesign supports tagged-text export from individual stories. If your layout file contains more than one story, you must export each one individually to capture all the text in your document. You can click anywhere in the text of a story or select as much of it as you want to export, then use the File menu's "Export" command with the document type set to "Tagged Text." If you want to see all the details of each tag, use the "Verbose" tag option; otherwise, choose "Abbreviated" to truncate long-form tags into shorthand versions. The resulting text file can use ASCII, ANSI, Unicode or various Asian-language encodings. You can open the file in any text- or word-processing application to accomplish editing tasks that are too complex for InDesign's Find/Replace or its built-in Story Editor.
Using Indexing With Tagged Text
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Adobe InDesign's tagging language supports 10 discrete index tags, from the basic index entry marker to entry types, styles and cross references. When you combine index codes with all the other formatting parameters you encounter in a range of tagged text, the coding can occupy more of the tagged-text file than the text itself. If you're especially familiar with InDesign's tag language, you can add some of its mark-up by hand in a text editor, but your coding must comply perfectly with the language to avoid corrupting the layout file into which you import your hand-tagged text or crashing InDesign in the process. When you finish editing or hand-tagging your text, you can reimport it into Adobe InDesign without losing your styles, indexing or style names.
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Related Searches
References
Resources
- Real World InDesign CS5; Olav Martin Kvern et al.
- InDesign CS5 Bible; Galen Gruman
- Photo Credit Ablestock.com/AbleStock.com/Getty Images
