What’s new in IndexMatic³ [UPDATE]

Imagine that you can extract, quantify, parse, and index every piece of text from your InDesign documents, in any language, based on your criteria: a pre-defined list of words, or a set of fine-tuned regular expressions, such as character styles or containers. . This tool has just been born and called IndexMatic³.

Update (March 6, 2023). – Version 3.23031 has just been released and fixed several bugs and display issues – including some typos in the PDF manual:

“Wait a minute! We already have a very suitable script for this.” Yes indeed, IndexMatic² has been known for a decade by thousands of users around the world, and it still delivers satisfactory results when it comes to creating a standalone index of InDesign writers. Well, that is precisely why IndexMatic has succeeded and replaced it. Years of user feedback and feature requests… read this little anthology:

Is there no way to selectively include/exclude paragraph styles?

– please! SOLVE HYPERLINKS IN THE INDEX!

– I need more letters of the alphabet! Can documents in Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic be analyzed and indexed?

– Too bad, I can’t do a three or four level index. Why stop at two?

Can your program detect matches in CONTEXT as in the figure below?

How can I target specific chapters in my book? And/or choose Custom for Open Documents?

– Can you let me preview the results of my regular expressions? Very frustrating that IndexMatic² ends up not finding results due to syntax errors!

– How can I filter out noise words like “the”, “that”, “and”…? (And the same in other languages!)

– We need more control over terminal commas, cross-references, and formatting! Also, our guidelines require PAGE RANGES to be formatted according to The Chicago Guide to Style rules.

– Is it possible to get the alphabetical addresses A, B, C… automatically. I’m exhausted from manually adding these fonts and adjusting the layout.

– How about noting the numbers? I’d like to see them in the index.

And so on and so on. In twelve years I have counted hundreds of requests of this kind, all very relevant, which cannot be implemented in IndexMatic² as easily as one might think.

IndexMatic³: Reworked from scratch

It is considered iX³ As the premium flavor of IndexMatic, which addresses the above questions (and many more). It has been carefully redesigned keeping real-world user demands in mind. Its new “search engine” is faster, Unicode aware, more stable, and delivers instant results that you can view up front, in the main dialog!

The script of course supports InDesign CC 2023… and still works fine in earlier versions (CS6/CS5/CS4):

above all, IndexMatic³ It adds about fifty features to IndexMatic², some basic, others more advanced, and you will discover them step by step by reading the user manual (110 pages).

So, what’s the deal?

• First, install and test the TRY version. If you’ve used IndexMatic² before, the difference should be obvious to you. (Note that iX³ and iX² are completely independent. Both can be installed in InDesign without conflict.)

• How is the TRY version limited? All features are available but you cannot produce more than 50 index entries. However, it is enough to evaluate the software and determine if your projects require a more powerful tool than the one you already have.

• What about the previous version? because IndexMatic³ is a major upgrade (also referred to as the “Expert” version), we have decided to keep the IndexMatic² (old version) as a separate product, still available but no longer updated. Hence users and customers can still access a more affordable solution. IndexMatic² has been known to perform decently in InDesign 2023 – although it hasn’t been updated for several years.

• Why the difference in price between the iX² and iX³? Just to give you a simple quantitative comparison, the current version of IndexMatic² has 5,600 lines of code, while the IndexMatic³ version (v3.2301) has 40,000 lines of code (2.5MB). You will understand very quickly, by testing the two solutions, that they are not on the same throughput scale.

• upgrade price. The normal price for an IndexMatic³ lifetime license is 129 euros. However, A.J 40% The discount applies to IndexMatic² users when they decide to purchase the Expert version. So they can access iX³ for 79 euros (saving 50 euros). More detailed instructions are provided in the application form.

Thanks and appreciation

The development of IndexMatic³ would not have been possible without the invaluable help from some of my colleagues who I want to especially thank here:

– Peter Kehrleone of the most knowledgeable people on both indexing and InDesign programming issues!

– Roland Dregera German-speaking designer and developer who helped me a lot in translating the German UI, and gave me a bunch of technical suggestions.

– Laurent Turniera friend and expert on GREP (well known to French visitors who I suspect are seasoned users), is a seasoned user of IndexMatic, and always very forthcoming with his critiques and ideas.

– Janus Bahs Jacqueta Danish reporter and IndexMatic user who suggested some subtle improvements to the search system and other layers of the program.

– Ariel Waldena talented and well-known colleague at Plugins IDwho gave me useful insights into Hebrew and right-to-left writing systems, and how to work with them in InDesign.

– Jean Claude Tremblayanother popular InDesign educator and trainer, helped me explain the educational aspects of moving from iX² to iX³.