How can I merge related terms in a framemaker index?

Question

I am using Framemaker to write a book. I have successfully created an index for the book. However, the index contains separate entries for similar terms that I wish to merge. For example, the index contains:

Analemma 31 analemma 30, 31, 32, 33 analemma’s 32 Analemmas 30 analemmas 32

I would like to have a single entry (analemma) for all of these possibilities. What is the most efficient way for me to do this? Do I need to edit the marker text at the time it is created? Should I instead just edit the generated index? Or is there some more automated way?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This is probably too late for you, but you could save your document as MIF (Maker Interchange Format, the spec can be found here). MIF is a text based format, the MIF file can be opened in your favourite text editor, and your index markers will look similar to

  <Marker
    <MType 2> # Index marker
    <MText `Analemma'> # Index entry
  > # end of Marker
  <String `some text about analemmas'>

<MType 2> and <MText ...> are the crucial pieces of information. You can simply change the value after MText to analemma.

Once you have figured out how the <MText> for analemma’s looks like in MIF it will probably be easy to create a regex that matches all of these.

Disclaimer: I have not worked with Framemaker in the last ten years, and I do not know if MIF support has been dropped in the meantime.