IndexMatic³ | 10 Tricks That Almost No One Knows
July 03, 2025 | IndexMatic³ | en | fr
So you use IndexMatic³ regularly, at cruising speed, but do you know the more secret features that no one ever told you about? Take advantage of the summer to give yourself a crash course on increased productivity. Hidden tools, shortcuts, and little-known tricks: here are our top 10…
⚡ Click on each animation to see all the details.
1. Quickly Adjust the Sorting Language
When opening the dialog box on a new InDesign document, you may have encountered this little alert icon ⚠ indicating a mismatch between the target language of the Stop Words and the alphabetical Sorting language. There is a quick way to restore the concordance without going through Output⏵Sorting: simply Ctrl-Click on the language label located to the right of the Stop Words list. This automatically readjusts the sort language.
Note: A single click (rather than Ctrl-Click) would just take you to the Sort panel.
2. Use the “Context” Button to Improve Lexical Consistency
During document preparation or analysis — prior to the indexing process —, a common problem is to identify the environment of a particular expression, not the pages where it appears. For example, you may want to verify that the uses of a word are consistent throughout the entire book. Or, you might want to ensure that a surname used in an IndexMatic query doesn't refer to homonymous contexts or distinct people, etc.
The Matches in Context function is well documented in the manual, but you might have neglected to use its services! Here, for example, is the extraction of the word “blood” from Hamlet (19 occurrences):
Note: The width of the "context" area is adjustable in the Preferences panel.
3. Report Not Found Entries using a Particular Symbol
By default, IndexMatic excludes terms with zero frequency from the index, i.e., those corresponding to unsatisfied queries. However, you can force it to output literal keys (tokens), although missing from the document, by lowering the minimum frequency to 0 (zero) in Output⏵Destination. Additionally, you can customize the character to display instead of page numbers, via Output⏵Layout⏵Ranges.
In the example below, the word serendipity (missing from the InDesign document) has been added to the Query List. It is then marked in the index with a long dash character (default option).
Note: This feature only makes sense in Query List mode. It specifically concerns literal expressions, since no explicit term is derivable from a regular expression.
4. Duplicate Word Search
IndexMatic can quickly find duplicates, i.e., single words that repeat with or without intervening punctuation. A predefined regular expression is saved among your favorites, so simply select it and run a Quick Scan (⚡) whenever needed:
Note: The regex in question, /(\w{2,})\W{1,3}(\1)/w, is quite elaborate, although intelligible to the most expert among you. You are, of course, free to improve it if it doesn't meet your expectations... and then to create your own favorite query!
5. Access to Online Resources
Did you know that the iX³ icon button is clickable and takes you directly to the program's home page in your default browser? No more searching through your archives for the user manual or a link to a forgotten tutorial: all the information about IndexMatic is right here.
6. Assign a PageRank Locally
Let's return to the Hamlet example. Some terms to be indexed are ubiquitous, such as love or king. The problem with working with a list of explicit queries is that you can't increase the PageRank globally, as you would lose some rarer terms that should be included in the index anyway. On the other hand, high-frequency words generate a considerable number of pages, which overloads the index. The solution is to assign a local PageRank flag (e.g. …/4) to the keywords that require more selective filtering.
The animation below shows how to target the most representative pages for certain keywords. The result is then reflected in the Hits window:
Note: A local PageRank flag (in your Query List) always overrides the PageRank option specified in the Finder.
7. Exotic Alphabets and Custom Stop Words
IndexMatic allows you to work with many languages and non-Latin alphabets. Even systems rarely encountered in an InDesign document, such as the Khmer script, are supported by the search engine. In some cases, the alphabet is indeed recognized — allowing you to extract theoretical words via a \w+ query — even though the linguistic resources (sorting language, stop words) are not available. But you can still define your own custom list of stop words to properly filter the units extracted by an automatic search.
Once you've selected the Alphabet in use, simply select the “[Custom]” field in the Stop Words list. This will open an editable text file that the program will then save and re-use when necessary.
Note: Using the same procedure, IndexMatic allows you to edit or expand any pre-existing stopword list, including built-in lists. Also, regarding the sorting of index entries, it is recommended to select the DUCET (Unicode sorting) option if no language is provided for the text under consideration.
8. Regular Expression Typing Shortcuts
Most IndexMatic metacharacters rely on the backslash followed by one or more characters, for example \w (alphabet letter), \M (capital letter), \p{…} (Unicode property), etc. Since these sequences are quite tedious to type on the keyboard, IndexMatic offers some undocumented shortcuts to speed up typing in the Find field.
| Metacharacter | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| \w | Ctrl W |
| \W | Ctrl Shift W |
| \l | Ctrl L |
| \L | Ctrl Shift L |
| \m | Ctrl M |
| \M | Ctrl Shift M |
| \d | Ctrl D |
| \D | Ctrl Shift D |
| \s | Ctrl S |
| \S | Ctrl Shift S |
| \b | Ctrl B |
| \B | Ctrl Shift B |
| \t | Ctrl T |
| [^\t] | Ctrl Shift T |
| [\'‘"“«] | Ctrl Q |
| \Q | Ctrl Shift Q |
| [\'’"”»] | Ctrl E |
| \E | Ctrl Shift E |
| \u | Ctrl U |
| \u{ | Ctrl Shift U |
| \y | Ctrl Y |
| \p{ | Ctrl P |
| \P{ | Ctrl Shift P |
The most common combination (Ctrl W for \w) is illustrated in the animation below:
9. How to Create a Weighted Word List for Wordalizer
From any document, IndexMatic can easily extract a list of words in a given frequency domain, then produce a Hits report associating each element with its frequency weight. If you want to represent this data as a word cloud through Wordalizer, you just need to retrieve it in an InDesign text frame and convert the spaces to colons in order to provide the script with a weighted word list. Here's a brief guide to how to do it:
10. Keep the Original Query List Order
The option to preserve the order of items as they appear in a query list is clearly described in the manual… but many users continue to ask us about it! Is this a documented hidden feature? Well, here's the trick:
