Indexing user-supplied section numbers

[jjlancaster]

Is it possible to index user-supplied section numbers, rather than pages? My document consists of about 5,000 sections, ranging in size from a few lines to a page or more. The numbers are not in a simple consecutive sequence, but have decimal additions or alphabetical additions, or both, sometimes with hyphens. (The document combines material from an original list and several separate supplements.)

[martin]

NWP's indexing tools always generate a listing of page numbers. Section numbers are not available, sorry. I'll file it as an enhancement request.

One workaround would be to instead use bookmarks and cross-references. For any term that would included in the index, instead bookmark it. Then later, when you're ready to put together the index, manually insert cross-references (which can display as section numbers) to every term previously bookmarked. This would be tedious and error pone if you have a lot of terms.

[phspaelti]

A much better work-around is to create an index by macro. Below I provide a simple version of such a macro.

This macro uses a character style to locate the section numbers (the style should be named "Section Numbers"). For the indexed items it uses Nisus' built-in index attribute. The index will be created in a new document, and consists of an alphabetized list of items followed by a tab, with section number references separated by comma+space.

One thing you do lose is the ability to do "Index as…". I think it would be possible to add that feature, but it would be a bit more work.

IndexBySectionNumber.nwm

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