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1. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
John Hawkinson Jun 1, 2011 11:00 AM (in response to GJ du Toit)Make a copy of your document.
Then, start chopping it up. Delete half the story (or half the pages). Problem still there?
Delete half again? Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Isolate to the text causing the problem.
Maybe start by making sure it actually works with a single sentence, though.
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2. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
GJ du Toit Jun 1, 2011 12:51 PM (in response to John Hawkinson)Thanks John!
In fact, shortly after posting my query, I went for a walk, thought about it, and decided on the same plan.
I split the document again and again, and when I was down to the final two pages, I had a look at the index entries left over, and hey! came across:
Laë�.��ë.�.��ct 66 of 1995
which should have read
Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995"
Fixed that, and it worked fine. I'm enormously relieved. Thank you very much for your response.
But hell, can't the error message be improved to tell you what the problem characters are (so you can search for them), or where they are, or both.
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3. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
macinbytes Jun 1, 2011 1:03 PM (in response to GJ du Toit)The index interface is the geeky younger brother who doesn't get a lot of attention. I've learned to hate it when spanning multiple files in a book and took it off my Christmas Card list when I had a book use more than a couple hundred entries.
Beats hand keying an index with a sales rep breathing over your shoulder though.
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4. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
John Hawkinson Jun 1, 2011 1:16 PM (in response to GJ du Toit)Fixed that, and it worked fine. I'm enormously relieved. Thank you very much for your response.
But hell, can't the error message be improved to tell you what the problem characters are (so you can search for them), or where they are, or both.
Indeed, I would consider it a bug, but I'm not sure that the InDesign team would. I would recommend you open a support case and try to get them to declare it a bug and get a bug number. http://adobe.com/go/supportportal. If you use the adobe.com/go/wish interface, well, you won't get a bug number and I suspect it'll be a fair bit less likely to get fixed.
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5. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
GJ du Toit Jun 2, 2011 12:51 AM (in response to macinbytes)The index interface is the geeky younger brother who doesn't get a lot of attention. I've learned to hate it when spanning multiple files in a book and took it off my Christmas Card list when I had a book use more than a couple hundred entries.
Beats hand keying an index with a sales rep breathing over your shoulder though.
You’re right, and I’m worried about it. This is a looseleaf 2-volume job (1000 pages per volume) that is revised twice a year, and the indexes (Index of Cases, Index of Statutes, General Index) are regenerated and reissued each time. So there’s no option but to use embedded indexes.
I inherited the job some years ago in Ventura, which is suited very well to this kind of work and handled the heavy footnotes and three separate indexes flawlessly. However, the bugs and instability eventually drove me crazy. I would love to have migrated this job to FrameMaker (which has the best indexing around, especially with the IxGen add-in), but FrameMaker’s footnotes are pathetic (can’t keep the note on the same page as the reference; can’t break a footnote across pages).
So I had little choice but to do it in InDesign. I’ve had problems before with missing entries in InDesign indexes generated from multifile books, but I sort of got the impression that it was fixed in one of the CS3 updates: I did some indexes later that seemed to be okay, with no obvious missing entries (on fairly small books, admittedly). Do you know whether that is indeed the case? Also, do you know whether CS5 handles indexing any better than CS3 (I’m doing this in CS3 although I’ve got CS5: had problems with exports to Tagged Text in CS5 which I hadn’t experienced in CS3, and so did this job in CS3 to avoid those.)
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6. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
GJ du Toit Jun 2, 2011 1:18 AM (in response to John Hawkinson)Indeed, I would consider it a bug, but I'm not sure that the InDesign team would. I would recommend you open a support case and try to get them to declare it a bug and get a bug number. http://adobe.com/go/supportportal.
Thanks again, John. I've opened a support case.
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7. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
John Hawkinson Jun 2, 2011 3:30 AM (in response to GJ du Toit)Making better user interfacs is well within the realm of scripting, and not necessarily even too hard.
But this comment struck me:
Also, do you know whether CS5 handles indexing any better than CS3 (I’m doing this in CS3 although I’ve got CS5: had problems with exports to Tagged Text in CS5 which I hadn’t experienced in CS3, and so did this job in CS3 to avoid those.)
What goes wrong?
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8. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
GJ du Toit Jun 2, 2011 4:05 AM (in response to John Hawkinson). . . problems with exports to Tagged Text in CS5
>> What goes wrong?
Footnotes move.
In the exported text, a footnote might move to a position earlier in the same paragraph. An example:
In the Smith1 case, the court followed the precedent set in the Jones2 case.
1 Smith v Smith 2011 ABC 123 etc.
2 Jones v Jones 2011 DEF 435 etc.
(With the footnotes codes replaced with {} to reduce clutter) this should export as:
In the Smith{Smith v Smith 2011 ABC 123 etc.} case, the court followed the Jones{Jones v Jones 2011 DEF 435 etc.} case.
But it may come out as:
In the Smith{Smith v Smith 2011 ABC 123 etc.}{Jones v Jones 2011 DEF 435 etc.} case, the court followed the Jones case.
or as:
{Smith v Smith 2011 ABC 123 etc.}{Jones v Jones 2011 DEF 435 etc.}In the Smith case, the court followed the Jones case.
And on re-import, the footnote references are, of course, in the wrong place. But the footnote numbers remain correct, and so the footnotes at the bottom of the page are correct, because the footnotes remain in the same order and in the same paragraph, only sometimes move to positions earlier in that paragraph.
I haven't been able to pin it down: when and where exactly it happens. It seemed to be haphazard and more common in some documents than others. I need to spend some time experimenting, and checking re-imported footnotes of a sample document against the original, but, having had to get the work done, I've simply opted out and used CS3 for documents where I might have to export to text and re-import.
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9. Re: Index entries contain invalid characters
John Hawkinson Jun 2, 2011 3:43 PM (in response to GJ du Toit)Curious. Well, I do think you should track it down.
At the least, figure out if it is on import or on export -- have you looked at the tagged text file in a text editor?



