nisus.com

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.)

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.

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.