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Dear Nisus folks:

Is it possible to add an option to use the word "Passim" to the indexing options? This is frequently used in legal table of authorities if a citation is on multiple pages; usually at least 4 times. Passim, of course, would replace the page number in the index one would use for a table of authorities.

Also, can we add a "update page numbers" only command to an index, like there is for Table of Contents? As it is, if you manually edit the index somehow (like some topography changes or expanding an abbreviation, etc) then all of your changes are lost if you update the page numbers.

Moving on, can we add a way to manually order index entries, rather than alphabetically? Here I am thinking about my 2 level index of "cases" and "statutes" and "rules." Rules comes before statutes alphabetically, but I would sometimes like to put my index in the order of "Constitutional Provisions" and then "statutes" and then "cases" and then "rules". Or maybe a different order.

Possibly even can we update an index entry only, not the entire table? So if I have an entry "Cases" and I update it, it only updates every entry that is under "cases" while leaving other same level index entries alone?

And finally, when you are using the "Index using word list" option, how does it handle conflicts? I unfortunately have several cases that may have the same name, for instance --while different courts or citations. Sometimes I refer to one of those cases, and sometimes to the other one. Is there a way to have a flag or option pop up with a "Conflict found--please select the full citation you would like to use" kind of thing, and then use that one for that document (naturally this would be a "sticky" setting)?

And while I personally do not use it, being able to index multiple documents into one index would be fantastic.

I realize some of these are tricky, but they would all be wonderful!

Vanceone wrote: ↑2023-01-16 14:36:54 Is it possible to add an option to use the word "Passim" to the indexing options? This is frequently used in legal table of authorities if a citation is on multiple pages; usually at least 4 times. Passim, of course, would replace the page number in the index one would use for a table of authorities.

This can already be done. Just index one of the subsequent occurrences using Index As and then insert "passim" (instead of "See: …") into the List cross-reference. The result looks like this:

Vanceone wrote: ↑2023-01-16 14:36:54 Moving on, can we add a way to manually order index entries, rather than alphabetically? Here I am thinking about my 2 level index of "cases" and "statutes" and "rules." Rules comes before statutes alphabetically, but I would sometimes like to put my index in the order of "Constitutional Provisions" and then "statutes" and then "cases" and then "rules". Or maybe a different order.

To my knowledge (it's been a while since I tried anything like this) you can order the index any way you want. It's just that, as you already noted, any such changes will be erased if you update the index later. This is why I would recommend writing a macro to reformat your index in the way you want. That way you can run the macro each time you update the index. The macro language allows you to define your own sort orders, though admittedly this is probably not the most trivial feature. So if you need help with how to do this, feel free to ask.

This is actually the feature that I would like to see added here. Allow the user to choose a macro to order the index as part of the Index Style.

Thanks for the feedback and feature requests Vance. I'll add your votes for the features you've described. However, this one is already possible:

Vanceone wrote: ↑2023-01-16 14:36:54 Moving on, can we add a way to manually order index entries, rather than alphabetically? Here I am thinking about my 2 level index of "cases" and "statutes" and "rules." Rules comes before statutes alphabetically, but I would sometimes like to put my index in the order of "Constitutional Provisions" and then "statutes" and then "cases" and then "rules". Or maybe a different order.

You can use the "sort by" indexing option for this purpose. You'll see it in the Indexing palette and Index As dialog. You can use whatever indexing topics generate the desired sort order. There's no rule that the sort topics are related in any way to the display topics.

As an example let's consider sorting all statutes before all cases. You might set the "sort by" option for Statute X to something like "1:Statute X". The "1" will act as the primary sort topic/key to place it first in the generated index. You'd use it for all your statutes, e.g. Statute Y would have a "sort by" of "1:Statute Y". You'd then use a primary sort topic of "2" for all your cases, so they come after the statutes. e.g. Case Z would have a "sort by" of "2:Case Z".

Hopefully that makes some sense.