Tutorials

Seeing where an entry actually appears in the text

To decide whether to keep an entry, demote it to a subentry, or remove a page reference, you often need to look at the actual page.

Click the term in the index so its entry box appears in the left panel. In the entry box, click the page number. A Full Text popup opens with that page in plain text. The term is highlighted; scroll if you need to find it.

Caveat: the popup shows reading-order text extracted from the PDF, not the visual page layout. Definition boxes, figure captions, and other floating elements often appear at the bottom of the page rather than where they sit in the PDF.

Changing the case of a term (e.g., "Infant-Directed Speech" → "infant-directed speech")

Publishers usually want lowercase entries; AI extraction sometimes produces title case.

Double-click the term name in the left panel (or in Index View). Type the corrected form. Enter saves; Escape cancels. This updates the standardized display name only — the raw text in the source document is not altered.

It is worth scanning the index after generation specifically for casing inconsistencies, since they tend to be systematic rather than one-off.

Right-click context menu vs. hover-button actions

The right-click menu in Index View and Graph View is faster than the hover buttons on a term box, but it is less forgiving.

Right-click → Delete executes immediately, with no "Confirm Delete?" intermediate step. The hover-button delete on a term box in Graph View requires a second click within 1.5 seconds to confirm.

Right-click deletions are still recoverable via Restore Deleted Terms in the toolbar, but if you tend to use the right-click menu, treat each click as committing the action.

Why can't I detach this subentry?

Some subentries have no detach control — they're labeled "contextual" in the entry box and the broken-chain icon is missing.

Two kinds of subentries exist. Hierarchical (referential) subentries are ones a user created by linking a term as a child of another — these can be detached anywhere. Contextual subentries are auto-generated by the AI from the parent term's mention contexts during indexing, and they are managed by the AI grouping system. They have no detach control by design.

Workaround: open the contextual subentry's Subentries popup and re-link it to its current parent. The conversion converts it from contextual to hierarchical. After that the broken-chain icon appears and detach works normally.

Making one term a subentry of another (e.g., "additive bilingualism" under "bilingualism")

A common cleanup move: pull a narrow term out of the top-level alphabet and nest it under a broader one.

Click "additive bilingualism" in the index so it appears in the left panel. Hover over its entry box; a Subentries button appears at the bottom-left. Click it.

In the popup, select "bilingualism" as the target term. Default direction: the term you clicked (additive bilingualism) becomes the parent, and the term you selected (bilingualism) becomes the child. That is the reverse of what you want, so click the Swap button to flip the relationship.

Click Convert. "additive bilingualism" now appears indented under "bilingualism."

Detaching a subentry back to top level

Reverse of the move above.

Click the child term to bring its entry into the left panel. Hover the entry box and click the broken-chain (Detach) icon mid-left. The term becomes a top-level entry again.

This only works for hierarchical (referential) subentries. See "Why can't I detach this subentry?" for the contextual case.

Removing a subentry but keeping its pages on the parent entry

Deleting a subentry outright would lose its mentions. There is a two-step workaround.

Hierarchical subentries keep their own mentions separate from the parent's mentions, so simply deleting the subentry also deletes those pages. To preserve them on the parent:

Step 1: Detach the subentry (broken-chain icon). It becomes a top-level term, carrying its mentions with it. Step 2: Find that newly top-level term in the index and Merge it into the original parent. The detached term is deleted and its mentions transfer to the parent.

Example: "variegated babbling" as a subentry of "babbling" → detach "variegated babbling," then find it under V in the index and merge it into "babbling."

Trimming a long page list to the core references

Publishers typically recommend no more than five page references per entry. AI extraction will often over-include.

Review each entry's page list and remove pages where the term is mentioned in passing rather than elaborated. Example: a chapter introduction listing topics will trigger a mention for each topic, even though only the body of the chapter actually develops them.

To remove a single page: select the term, expand its entry box via the box-with-arrow icon at the top-right, then click the trash can next to the page reference. Each page is its own mention. To remove a span like 84-86, you delete page 84, then page 85, then page 86 individually.

To collapse a series with gaps (e.g., 154, 156, 159) into a clean range (154-159) when the term is genuinely covered across that span, double-click the page list and type the range manually.

Adding a term the AI missed

Manual addition runs a text search across the document for the new term and creates mentions automatically. If no mentions are found, the term still gets created — you just need to add pages by hand.

Toolbar → Add Terms → Add Terms Manually → type the term → click the green Add button. Indexia searches the document for the term and adds any pages it finds.

If the search finds nothing relevant, the term is still created but won't appear in the index until it has at least one page. Add pages manually by double-clicking the page list (or, in Graph View, using the + button next to the page list).

Real example: a user added "vocal tract, infant and adult" expecting the search to fail. It did. They then manually added pages 59-60, and the term appeared in the index.

Final formatting in Word

Some line-layout and punctuation refinements are easier to do after export than in the editor.

For fine punctuation control (specific commas, semicolons, hanging indents to publisher spec) and rare line-break decisions, finish the structural edit in Indexia first, export to Word (.docx), and do the polishing pass in your downstream word processor.