Index Fixes: CJK Topic Names Don’t Appear

Usually, when you add a topic in an InDesign index whose name starts with a non-Latin letter (a digit, punctuation mark, or non-Latin script), InDesign creates a topic section Symbols and places the topic there. But with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters that doesn’t happen: they just don’t appear at all, not anywhere.

On the other hand, topic names using other non-Latin scripts (Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillc, etc.), do appear but they are all lumped together in the Symbols section, which means among other things that section letters aren’t inserted and those languages aren’t sorted correctly.

To make sure that all non-Latin topics appear in their own dedicated sections, enable their scripts in the index sort-order window. It’s very simple.

1. Open the Index panel (Window > Type & Tables > Index (Shift+F8 by default)), open the fly-out menu, and select Sort options to open the Sort options window:

In the Sort options window, scroll down to the language you want to enable. We want to enable Japanese and Korean, so we check the boxes at those entries:

The enabled script names are added to the index panel:

Now you can add CJK topic names. If your index already contained topic names in the Latin script, they are moved to the Roman section.

Return to Index Fixes page.

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