home › Forums › idx general support › Index entries anchored within a word instead of at end
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I find some index entries, despite my best efforts, anchor themselves within a word (often between the first and second letters) instead of at the end of the word.
This becomes a problem if I create a fresh work file and load another version of my manuscript file. Index-Manager cannot locate where these entries should be, and so anchors them all at the beginning of the file. (The status code marks them as problematic.) I then have to work out where they should be placed in the text and re-anchor them in the correct positions. I have not found this re-anchoring process straightforward! (a topic for another post, perhaps).
In the index I have recently completed there were 33 entries affected this way, out of 1032 (so about 3% of entries).
Does anyone know why some index entries get placed in the middle of words? Is there any way to avoid or correct this?
I’ve noticed some anchors in the middle of words (and never understood why) but haven’t noticed any problems as a result – but then I haven’t yet had to create a fresh work file very often.
The only thing I can think of to avoid it is to manually move the anchor point whenever you notice it going in the middle of a word. But this adds to the time and reduces efficiency so not ideal albeit certainly better than having to work out where you had originally placed the entry.
I’d be interested in advice on this too.
We have had this before, in Word documents that have been corrected several times, the word boundaries in XML sometimes reflect the history of editing and not the actual words. One recognizes this also if one tries to select a word in the text view in Index-Manager and only parts of a word are marked. In such cases, it happens that Index Manager also places the entry within a word. It helps if you copy the whole text into a new Word document and save it again. Then a new XML with clean word boundaries is generated by Word.
Hope this is a solution, when it happens very often in a project.Thank you, Katharina and Janice for your thoughts.
Katharina – you have reminded me that James Lamb (author of WordEmbed) advised that one should initially open the Word file using ‘open and repair’ before working on it. I had forgotten this, but it might be another thing to try.
Jan – I haven’t worked out at what point the index entries end up in the middle of words, but I know I have tried correcting them sometimes and they’ve looked OK, but later they revert to being inside the word. (I’ve been trying to experiment to get a better grasp of what goes wrong and when, but am now having trouble replicating the problems!)
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