Marked up index exported to XML

Question

Hi,
I'm very new to ID. I am currently importing Excel tables into Indesign. Basically, my book/chapters are made up of tables. Next, I need to create an index therefore, I started marking up my content (creating index entry page references). Once our book is done we need to export this content to XML. I realize i can map styles to tags for the export to XML. However, my question is how can I export the markedup index content to xml? The whole idea of going from Excel to ID was so that we wouldn't have to do the index twice.
Any advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

With Scripting, you can do just about everything, except the one thing I wanted to show (off): creating a run of text in memory, then loading your 'place text cursor' with it ...
Anyway, this little javascript shows you how to "get" the index entries themselves out of InDesign. This is just the list of entries; each entry in itself (going by the name of "Topic") contains a list of PageReferences -- zero or more -- that point to the actual text insertion point where each of the entries proper reside in your full text. Weeding them out one by one should also be possible, and even automatically putting XML tags around them, but you have to remember they need to be "visible" in your plain text to be able to export. With that, I mean it might well be possible to write a script that writes out every entry as "plain text" (and possibly, including the correct tags), but they *will* appear inside the text where you inserted the actual index entry. Hence, my suggestion of very small and invisibly colored text.
I guess you'll need to think about how to handle this.
This is my "proof of concept" scriptlet; it only gathers the index entry list (with possible sub-entries) and displays them as an alert:
var list = [ "My Index" ];
for (i=0; i< app.activeDocument.indexes[0].topics.length; i++)
     list.push (app.activeDocument.indexes[0].topics[i].name);
     for (j=0; j<app.activeDocument.indexes[0].topics[i].topics.length; j++)
          list.push (" >> "+app.activeDocument.indexes[0].topics[i].topics[j].name);
alert (list.join("\r"));