@Noel_Ramos: "Has anyone experienced a situation where the index generated from a booked project is not including all marked index items?
For some strange reason we're not seeing a large number of items from two entire sections of our book in the generated index."
    @Noel_Ramos: "Follow up question: Can I merge an index generated from the two missing sections into the now heavily edited main index?"
    @Noel_Ramos: "I can't regenerate the index Bob, it's been heavily edited, formatted and augmented. We can't afford to lose all that work. We discovered the missing data after all that extra tweaking had been done."
    @Dave_Saunders: "Noel,
Yes, indexes can be merged, but it is not trivial. Takes a script. I have written such a script before for a client with a particular configuration of index. The principles are not rocket science, but the details are many.
Contact me by e-mail if you're interested in pursuing such a solution.
FWIW, the script I wrote for the other client was sufficiently successful that they took to running indexes a chapter at a time and then using my script to merge them because it was quicker than letting InDesign's built-in indexing feature do the work across the whole book.
Dave"
    @Noel_Ramos: "Well unfortunately my client can't justify the expense of hiring a script writer to give us a nice elegant fix to this problem, which is too bad. Dave Saunders seems to have a nice little script that would be perfect.
I am now forced to merge the monsters manually. :(
What we have learned is that its wise to index each individual chapter in a large document FIRST, before indexing the whole book. It's much faster, less crashy and lets you proof and format the index in small chunks until you're totally ready to book the project and generate the full index. You then also have the ability to check the individual chapter print-outs against the full index to confirm that no listings got mysteriously omitted.
We're also doing all our editing in the Index palette this time and trying to avoid local edits in the final text to the greatest degree possible. That way if we have to regenerate for any reason, we won't lose many hours of work that had been spent on formatting and edits.
I'll let you know how it goes on the next full index after we run it tomorrow."
    @Dave_Saunders: "I hasten to comment that my script is not a general solution to merging indexes, but a custom script that worked with a particular format that one of my client's was using. I would have had to recustomize it for Noel to match the format he's using.
Dave"
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