I don’t usually discuss technical writing on my blog, mainly because technical writing is my profession, and I try to spend as little time and energy on my profession outside of work hours. But in this case, I’m working on a side project, and I found a solution to a problem I thought I should share.

Summary

In InDesign, when creating an index, to cross-reference singular and plural words in a single topic, add both the singular and plural words as separate topics, then rename one of the topics to match the other, and the topics will be combined.

The Problem

When creating new index cross-references in InDesign, I select a word in the document, in this case, “obligations”, and open the Index > New cross-reference dialog. The dialog New Page Reference then shows the selected word in the Topic Levels.

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But in my index, I want to include not just the plural “obligations” but also singular “obligation”.

Will changing the reference to “obligation” work? Does InDesign perform a partial word match to include both “obligation” and “obligations”?

No. This doesn’t work. InDesign searches on the whole word when adding topics. It doesn’t perform a partial word match. The result is that only the word “obligation” is added.

And the results don’t even include the word on the page I had selected. So I select the word “obligations” again, open the Index > New cross-reference dialog, and click Add All.

Now I have both “obligation” and “obligations in my Index Preview, but they are separate entries. When I generate my index, they will appear as separate entries, which is not ideal.

What to do?

The Solution

After trying various methods for combining the two topics, I stumbled on the solution. I say stumbled because the solution was not an obvious or intuitive option presented in InDesign.

Double-click the “obligations” topic to open Topic Options, change it to “obligation” and click OK.

Since both topics are now the same word, InDesign will automatically combine both topics into one.

And now the word “obligations” on the page I was looking at has been indexed.

When the index is generated, all entries for “obligations” and “obligation” are combined into one topic.