What’s New in IndexMatic³ [UPDATE]
March 06, 2023 | IndexMatic³ | en | fr
Imagine you can extract, quantify, analyze and index every bit of text from your InDesign documents, in any language, based on your own criteria: a predefined word list, a set of fine-tuned regular expressions, such or such character styles or containers. This tool has just been born and is called IndexMatic³.
Update (6-Mar-2023). — Version 3.23031 has just been released and fixes various bugs and display issues — including a few typos in the PDF manual:
“Wait a minute! We already have a pretty suitable script for that purpose.” Yes indeed, IndexMatic² has been known for a decade by thousands of users around the world, and it still provides satisfactory results when it comes to making an independent index from an InDesign book. Well, it is exactly for this reason that IndexMatic³ succeeds and supplants it. Years of user feedbacks and feature requests… Read this little anthology:
— Is there no way to include/exclude paragraph STYLES selectively?
— Pleaaaase! Provide a solution for having page HYPERLINKS in the index!
— I need more ALPHABETS! Could it be possible to parse and index documents in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic?
— Too bad I can't do a THREE or FOUR LEVEL index. Why stop at two?
— Can your program reveal matches in CONTEXT, as in the figure below?
— How can I target specific chapters in my book? And/or a CUSTOM SELECTION of opened documents?
— Could you please allow me to PREVIEW the results of my regular expressions? So frustrating that IndexMatic² ends up finding no results because of syntax errors!
— How could I filter out NOISE WORDS like ‘the’, ‘that’, ‘and‘, ‘which’…? (And the same in other languages!)
— We need much more contol on final SEPARATORS, cross-references and formatting! Also, our guidelines require us to format PAGE RANGES according to the Chicago Manual of Style rules.
— Is it possible to get ALPHABETIC HEADINGS A, B, C… automatically generated. I'm exhausted from manually adding those lines and adjusting the layout.
— What about NOTE NUMBERS? I'd like to see them in the index.
And so on. In twelve years I counted a hundred requests of this kind, all extremely relevant, which could not be implemented in IndexMatic² as easily as one might think.
IndexMatic³: Reworked From Scratch
Consider iX³ as the premium flavor of IndexMatic, the one that addresses the above questions (and many more). It has been carefully redesigned with real-life user requests in mind. Its new “search engine” is faster, Unicode-aware, much more stable, and delivers instant results that you can view upfront, in the main dialog!
The script of course supports InDesign CC 2023… and still works fine in previous versions (CS6/CS5/CS4):
Above all, IndexMatic³ adds around fifty features to IndexMatic², some essential, others more advanced, which you will discover step by step by reading the user manual (110 pages).
So, What Is The Deal?
• First, install and test the TRY version. If you have used IndexMatic² before, the difference should be obvious to you. (Note that iX³ and iX² are totally independent. Both can be installed in InDesign without conflict.)
• How is the TRY version limited? All the features are available but you cannot produce more than 50 index entries. It is however very sufficient to evaluate the program, and to determine whether your projects require a more powerful tool than those you already have.
• What about the previous version? Because IndexMatic³ is a major upgrade (also referred to as the “expert” version), we decided to maintain IndexMatic² (the legacy version) as a separate product, still available but no longer updated. Hence users and customers can still access a more affordable solution. IndexMatic² is known to run decently in InDesign 2023—although it hasn't been updated for several years.
• Why such a price difference between iX² and iX³? Just to give you a simple, quantitative comparison, the current IndexMatic² release has 5,600 lines of code, while IndexMatic³ (build 3.2301) has 40,000 lines of code (2,5MB). You will understand very quickly, by testing the two solutions, that they are not on the same productive scale.
• Upgrade Price. The regular price for one IndexMatic³ lifetime license is €129. However, a 40% discount applies to IndexMatic² users whenever they decide to purchase the expert version. So they get access to iX³ for €79 (saving €50). More detailed instructions are provided in the order form.
TRY Version Demo (in French):
Acknowledgments
The development of IndexMatic³ would not have been possible without the invaluable help of some of my colleagues whom I would like to especially thank here:
— Peter Kahrel, one of the most knowledgeable people I know on both indexing issues and InDesign scripting!
— Roland Dreger, a German-speaking designer and developer who helped me a lot on translating the UI in German, and brought me a bunch of technical suggestions.
— Laurent Tournier, a friend and GREP-expert (well known to indiscripts' French visitors I guess) who is a seasoned IndexMatic user, always extremely relevant in his criticisms and ideas.
— Janus Bahs Jacquet, a Danish correspondent and IndexMatic user who suggested some very subtle improvements to the search system and other layers of the program.
— Ariel Walden, talented and renowned colleague at Id-Extras, who gave me helpful insights into Hebrew and right-to-left writing systems, and how they're handled in InDesign.
— Jean-Claude Tremblay, another famous InDesign guru and trainer, who helped me clarify didactic aspects in the iX²-to-iX³ transition.