InDesign, indexing and Acrobat

[aesart]

Greetings All!
Back in the days of PageMaker there used to be a feature(?) whereby I could create a document, make index entries during the creation, then after the main portion was completed, I could generate an index, include it as part of the publication (in the back, naturally), and when PageMaker would generate the PDF file, the index entries were hyper-linked to where they were referencing in the document, and even appeared in Acrobat's index as well.

Well of course, when you initiate a feature like that for online documents, then it disappears, I'm catching flak for it from my employers who have been begging me to bring it back - trouble is, each one of these documents contains about 3500 references.

Does anyone know if this feature is even in InDesign (Adobe's forums have been silent on this), or is there a third party product that could accomplish this?
:D

[AdobeAce]

Hi aesart,

You'll be happy to know that Acrobats exported out of InDesign will have interactive Indexes and Tables of Contents if you select the appropriate settings when exporting.

According to the Help Menu in InDesign CS2 -- InDesign "Creates Adobe PDF hyperlink annotations for InDesign hyperlinks, table of contents entries, and index entries."

I've used this interactive feature with Tables of Contents and it works great. What's best about it is that it creates all of the links automatically upon Export. I love features that do impressive stuff automatically with no work.

Hope this helps!

[aesart]

Granted, I did not know until now that this had been fixed... Only, before you would click on the indexed phrase, and now you click on the page number... but that's a small detail...

Now, if I could just get it to automatically generate the index list in the Bookmarks in Reader... What it amounted to was that our customers could look up a part number in the Bookmarks column and go right to the page they wanted. And like I say, this was all done automatically in PageMaker export...

[AdobeAce]

Now, if I could just get it to automatically generate the index list in the Bookmarks in Reader...

Hi aesart:

Just curious! Is there a reason you can't just call your Index "Parts Bookmarks" and be done with it?

I'm not sure, but probably Adobe had to make a choice -- convert Tables of Contents into Bookmarks automatically, OR Indexes into Bookmarks. If they did both, the Bookmarks generated probably would have been an unusable mess. (It's too bad that the application doesn't offer you a choice of which to make into Bookmarks.)

You might be able to use the Table of Contents feature to generate your Index. The TOC feature (Layout > Table of Contents) is Paragraph Style based, so as long as the Part Numbers are a distinct Paragraph Styles it should work great. But make sure you check "Create PDF Bookmarks" in the TOC dialog box.

[emauss]

I hope you guys are still monitoring this....
I just switched from PM7 to ID CS2 have the same problem with indexes not creating bookmarks. I, too have a highly indexed catalog and found the bookmarks made by PM when exporting to be very useful.
Yes, the index pages are hyperlinked, but they do not appear in the bookmark section. If I choose the paragraph style of the index (for TOC), I get a link to the index page (not to the hyperlink). If I select the paragraph style of the "product" (for TOC), I get a totally unuseable, unindexed item.
Adobe ID tech says there is nothing they can do. That part of the code was left out in ID. Adobe Acrobat tech says there is nothing in acrobat to create the bookmarks....try third part. Tried Virginia....they said they don't have anything, but will write something for me if I want to commission it (LOL).
I submitted a request to Adobe to add this feature (back in!!!!!).

Eric