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What computer does CINDEX need?

CINDEX is available for both Windows and Mac platforms. CINDEX for Windows currently works on any supported version of Microsoft Windows, including Windows 10 and 11. CINDEX for Mac works on any Mac computer running macOS 10.9 (Mavericks) through macOS 13 (Ventura).

How is CINDEX supplied?

The complete CINDEX package is provided as a download.

Is CINDEX hard to learn?

CINDEX for Mac and CINDEX for Windows provide the standard look and feel familiar to Mac or Windows users. You work with CINDEX as you would work with any other Windows or Mac program. If you know how to work with other Windows or Mac programs, you will quickly feel at home with CINDEX. In designing CINDEX, we have paid particular attention to the requirements of indexers, especially their need for efficient use of the keyboard. You can accomplish almost every task without your fingers having to leave the keyboard.

Does CINDEX come with documentation?

CINDEX is delivered complete with an outstanding User’s Guide in PDF format:

These guides are written to take you through the indexing process with CINDEX rather than to just provide a list of commands. As you would expect, both versions of the Guide contain a comprehensive index. CINDEX also provides instantly accessible context-sensitive help that explains each command and setting you will use as you work on an index.

What kind of customer support do you provide?

Our customer support is legendary and free to registered CINDEX users. We have even been known to help users of pirated copies, but we hope you won’t become an unlicensed user.

Can I use CINDEX on a network?

Yes, but there will be no protection against concurrent modification of files by different users. For indexers in a multi-user environment, we offer a special Publishers’ Edition of CINDEX for Windows. This provides several extra features for the indexer and a range of administrative services for managing CINDEX in a networked environment.

I've been using another indexing program. Can CINDEX work with material I have prepared previously?

CINDEX can import index entries in several formats, so it can probably deal with entries you have prepared in another program. CINDEX can work directly with entries in these formats:

• Text export format used by Sky Index 6 (.txt) and Sky Index 7 (.sky7)

• Backup (.mbk) format used by Macrex

• Plain text records with quote-delimited, comma-separated fields (a standard database format)

• Plain text records with tab separated fields (a standard database format)

We also offer file conversion services for unusual formats. If you have a conversion question, please contact us.

Can I try CINDEX before I buy it?

Demonstration copies of CINDEX for Windows and CINDEX for Mac are available free of charge for you to download. You can also download the superb User’s Guide (for Windows or Mac) in Portable Document Format (PDF).

Will I be able to create a proper index with the demo (Mac/Windows) version?

The demo is not a “walk-through” but rather a fully functional version of the program. It is, however, restricted to 100 records in each index file you create. With students in mind, we also have a Student Edition ($79) that has an increased capacity of 500 records/index file. The full version is essentially unlimited in its capacity.

When you install the demo, it opens and is ready for work. Create an index document at File Menu/New and add your first record with Edit Menu/New Record (Mac: Command K, Windows: Control K).

We recommend that you read the first four chapters (approx. 75 pages, full of illustrations) of the User’s Guide, the PDF of which is included with the installer package or can be downloaded separately.

You may also wish to go onto YouTube and look at our “Getting Started” videos. Simply enter “CINDEX tutorial” into the search box. These are demonstrated on the PC version, but the record interface is the same between platforms. However, Mac users should substitute “Command” each time you hear or see “Control.”

Once CINDEX is installed, how do I get started?

When you install CINDEX, it opens and is ready for work. Create an index document at File Menu/New and add your first record with Edit Menu/New Record (Mac: Command K, Windows: Ctrl-k).

We recommend that you read the first four chapters (approx. 75 pages, full of illustrations) of the User’s Guide, the PDF of which is included with the installer package or can be downloaded separately.

Do you offer competitive upgrades?

For licensed users of other Windows-based indexing programs, we offer a discount that can be applied to the purchase of CINDEX for Windows. Proof of purchase is required.

Do you offer discounts to ASI members?

We do not currently offer discounts for membership in professional organizations.

How often is CINDEX upgraded?

Our development work is constant. Major new releases (upgrades) appear at intervals of 2–3 years, but like all other major software packages, minor housekeeping updates appear whenever there is a need.

What is your upgrade policy?

Liberal. Users who purchased a full CINDEX license within the six months preceding an upgrade release receive the upgrade free of charge. By keeping upgrade prices low for other users, we encourage regular upgrades to new versions.

Does CINDEX require additional software?

CINDEX does not use a word processor or other software to create or view finished indexes, nor does it require text produced by other programs. CINDEX is an indexing tool for professional indexers who compose entries directly in files created by CINDEX. CINDEX performs all the routine indexing tasks—sorting, checking, formatting, punctuating, and printing index entries—and provides powerful features to help you edit, check cross-references, and check the validity of your index entries. CINDEX can, of course, save indexes as formatted documents that are compatible with your word processor or composition/design package.

How do I supply indexes to clients and publishers?

CINDEX’s Save As (Save To on the Mac) options allow you to produce finished indexes as fully formatted documents, automatically formatting and encoding your output file. Options include file types that are compatible with word processors and composition/design programs. CINDEX can also provide indexes tagged for typesetting or electronic composition and allows you the ability to create custom markup tag sets.

Sorting

How can I produce a record order sort?

Under the View menu, choose the item Sorted. This is a toggle setting and clicking it on and off switches between sorted and unsorted views. Without the check mark in front of the menu item, you’ll see your index in the order in which you entered the records (unsorted). With the check mark, you’ll view your index sorted according to the sort parameters you’ve chosen.

All of my entries that begin with quotation marks are sorting before the letter A. How do I make them appear in correct alphabetical order?

Choose Sort (from the Tools menu) and make sure that you’ve chosen either Word-by-Word or Letter-by-Letter alphabetizing rather than Simple alphabetizing. Simple alphabetizing attends to the quotes, while Word-by-Word and Letter-by-Letter alphabetizing ignore them (and other punctuation and symbols).

I am using Letter-by-Letter sorting, but my index isn't alphabetized. My entries remain in the order in which I entered them, and each entry is displayed with a new group header letter.

You probably have your view set to show entries in unsorted order. Check under the View menu that the item Sorted has a check mark next to it. If it doesn’t, choose Sorted. (You can also check this at a glance because CINDEX displays “Sorted” or “Unsorted” on the bar at the bottom of the screen.)

I have asked CINDEX to ignore "the" when sorting the index, but it doesn't.

There are two possible reasons why “the” is not being ignored:

You are using Simple alphabetizing. CINDEX does not ignore articles or prepositions when you use Simple alphabetizing. You must use Word-by-Word or Letter-by-Letter alphabetizing (choose Sort from the Tools menu).

Even if you are using Word-by-Word or Letter-by-Letter alphabetizing, CINDEX will ignore “the” only if it is the first word in a sub-heading or sub-sub-heading. CINDEX does not ignore leading articles and prepositions in main headings. If you want CINDEX to ignore “the” as a leading word in a main heading, place the word to be ignored inside angle brackets, as in <The >Wind in the Willows.

Why aren't Greek letters sorting properly?

When an index is sorted by English collation rules, letters from other alphabets (e.g., Greek) are filed after Latin letters. To make CINDEX sort a Greek letter as something else, for example, to sort omega (Ω) as “o”, you would place the letter “o” beside it in braces as {o} and hide Ω from sorting by placing it inside angle brackets, as <Ω>.

Page References

When I view entries in Fully Formatted View, my page numbers are out of order. They are okay in Draft View. What is happening?

In a draft or unformatted view of the index, CINDEX displays references exactly as you entered them in records. In a formatted view, CINDEX normally sorts a series of references so that they appear in ascending order (you control this behavior by choosing Page References from the Document menu). If CINDEX does not order references in the way you want, one of two things is probably happening.

You might have references whose components are separated by different forms of punctuation. CINDEX normally assumes that a comma separates one reference from the next. If you are using a comma to separate parts of a single reference and some other character such as a semicolon to separate complete references, you must tell CINDEX what character you are using. To do this, choose Reference Syntax from the Document menu.

If you have compound references containing letters and numbers or even Roman numerals and month names, you will need to tell CINDEX how it should prioritize the different components. To do this, choose Sort from the Tools menu, then under Character Priority on the Text tab, drag the items Letters, Numbers, and Symbols to the positions that reflect the precedence you want (the one at the top of the list has highest precedence).

I have to work with folioed but unpaginated pages for my next index. I know I can input the temporary pagination with an attached chapter number using the construct 35%1 (meaning the first page of chapter 35), but how do I handle page spreads, and do I need to put the chapter number before every single page number?

Input page spreads with the chapter number and % before the first part only (e.g., 35%3-6). However, each individual reference MUST have the chapter number and % in front of it (e.g., 35%4, 35%7, 35%10). To avoid constant re-typing of 35%, you can place this sequence on a hot key so that you only need to use one keystroke.

I've just used Alter References (Tools menu) to convert my temporary pagination to final form and discovered that entries for chapter 19 were altered twice. HELP!

You probably entered 9% to denote chapter 9 and 19% to denote chapter 19. When you set up to make adjustments for chapter 9 and specified a Matching Pattern of 9%, CINDEX would have altered references to pages in chapters 9, 19, 29, 39, etc. because it was looking to match any sequence of characters that contained 9%. You can correct the error by subtracting the offset you unintentionally added to references for chapter 19. Set the Matching Pattern to 19% and set Adjustment to the negative of the number you originally added. To avoid this kind of problem when dealing with temporary pagination of chapter numbers with single and multiple digits, you should always use leading zeros to ensure a uniform number of digits preceding the % (e.g., 009%, 019%, 109%).

Formatting

How can I display all main entries in boldface?

Go to the Document menu and choose Headings. Click the Style button to bring up a box where you can choose Boldface (among other style attributes).

How do I insert an introductory note into my index?

You create an index entry that contains the text of the note, then you make CINDEX place this at the head of the index. First, be sure that your Sort is set to Letter-by-Letter or Word-by-Word alphabetizing. Create an index entry (or entries) that contains the text of your introductory note. Each entry will contain information that forces its placement at the beginning of your index. If you want empty lines to follow the note, you will need to create entries with hidden text that you force into position after the note. For example, if you wanted the introduction to your index to look like this:

Index entries reference volume, then page.
For full information, please see individual entries in the index at the end of each volume.

Abacus, 12:8
Abracadabra, 6:7
. . . .

You would make a series of separate entries that look like this in Draft view (record numbers are merely for illustration; do not type them in records):

1 { a}<Index entries reference volume, then page.>
2 { b}<For full information, please see individual entries in the index at the end of each volume.>
3 { c}< >
4 Abacus_12:8
5 Abracadabra_6:7

The contents of the braces in records #1 and #2 in the example—a leading space followed by a letter: { a}—force the sorting of your introductory material but will not appear on screen or in a print. The angle brackets (< >) enclosing your text will allow it to appear normally but will ensure that it does not affect the sort. Since CINDEX does not print or display completely blank lines or entries, you must use the angle brackets enclosing a space to make it display an apparently blank entry (as in record #3 in the example).

My client has specified a set number of characters per line. They want me to format my index so that lines are 35 characters wide, at 10 characters per inch. How should I proceed?

First, keep in mind that you’re concerned with line length so that you can give your client a controlled line count, which they will use for estimating a page count for the index. Many clients do not realize that CINDEX can provide direct estimates of page count if you specify the type size, font size, and page layout. You may wish to remind your client that if you have this information, you can provide a direct estimate of page count.

If you must provide a fixed number of characters per line, do the following. First, choose Courier for your font (sometimes called “Courier New” on computers running Windows), and choose a size of 12 points. Unlike proportionally spaced fonts, which use varying amounts of space for different characters, Courier is a monospaced font that uses exactly the same amount of space for each character. For example, lowercase i and m each occupy the same space. As you may remember from typing class, if you’d set your typewriter to 10 characters per inch, you then would “work backwards” and plan your margins based on your paper width. Similarly, if you use Courier 12 (which simulates 10 pitch on the typewriter—10 characters per inch) you can do a little math and figure where you’d like your margins to fall using inches as your unit of measure. You’ll use this formula:

(character count for column width x .10″) + total margins = paper width
or
total margins = paper width – (character count for column width x .10″)

Based on a 35-character line, and an 8.5″ x 11″ page size, it works out like this:

35 x .10″ + total margins = 8.5″
or
total margins = 8.5″ – (35 x .10″)
which reduces to
total margins = 8.5″ – 3.5″ = 5.0″

You can split the total amount for the margins however you’d like: 4″ and 1″, or 2″ and 3″, or 0″ and 5″, and so on. CINDEX might adjust one or both of the settings slightly, depending on your printer’s needs. Don’t worry about this—the correction will not affect the number of characters displayed on a line.

Keep in mind that your client is probably asking for this because they’re using an old method for estimating pages, dating from a time when indexes were submitted as typewritten copy. This is not unusual; many publishers struggle with this daily. Since the advent of proportionally spaced fonts, with all their possible size and style variations, and the flexibility in specifying indentations (Just how big is a tab or an en dash or an em space anyway?) and page sizes, publishers have found it hard to develop satisfactory methods for estimating the size of the printed index.

I seem to get variable spacing between the last character of the text and the first page number. What am I doing wrong?

Check your settings by choosing Page References from the Document menu. There are two separate settings for Punctuation: Before Single and Before Multiple. Be sure that you’ve got identical settings in both of these boxes. The Before Single setting will be applied when your text is followed only by one reference, and the Before Multiple setting will be applied when you’ve more than one reference for a particular index entry.

Sometimes, text that looks variably spaced on the screen is, in fact, spaced correctly for printing. Letters formed on the screen can look incorrectly spaced because the resolution of the screen is lower than the resolution of your printer. If you are in doubt, print a test page.

Preparing

My editor has asked for sequences of tabs to be inserted to identify sub-headings in an RTF-encoded file. Is she confusing tabs with the styles definitions that RTF provides?

Maybe, maybe not. The leading indentation that CINDEX provides for subheadings in a Rich Text Format file can be defined either as an attribute of the subheading or as a sequence of characters (usually tabs). Which method CINDEX uses by default is determined by settings you make by choosing Preferences (Formatted Export) from the Edit menu (Windows) or the CINDEX menu (Mac). When you use Save As… (Windows) or Save To… (Mac) from the File menu to save an RTF file, you can override the default setting.

My editor has told me that each index line in the file must not exceed 43 characters. How do I provide a file with this number of characters per line?

You don’t. When you save a formatted index in a file, CINDEX does not save line breaks because you do not know the font or type size in which the index is to be set. If you want to view or print the index with the 43-character width limit, see the answer above.

My editor has asked for a plain ASCII file? What is this and how do I make it?

An ASCII file contains only the formatted text of entries; it does not contain information about type styles (e.g., boldface or italics) or fonts. To make such a file, choose Save As… from the File menu. Then, in the dialog box that CINDEX displays, choose Plain Text from the Format pop-up menu (Mac) or Save as Type list (Windows). Note, however, that all information about type styles and fonts will be omitted from the file (it is retained in the original index). For this reason it is generally not a good idea to save indexes as plain text files.

How can I ensure that the file I've made is correctly encoded?

All CINDEX documents that contain formatted indexes are text documents and can be opened and viewed by any word processor or text editor. Depending on the document type, the word processor that you use to open it may or may not interpret the formatting information. If you have made a file in Rich Text Format (RTF), the word processor will interpret the formatting information and should display the document as it looked when displayed by CINDEX in a fully formatted view. If you have made a document that contains markup tags for typesetting, you will see these tags displayed as plain text.

Files & Internet

How can I back up my index?

There are several ways to make a backup copy of the index you are working on:

From within CINDEX, choose Save Backup Copy… (Windows) or Save A Copy… (Mac) from the File menu.
To save an archival copy of an index (from which you can later reconstruct a working index), save XML records. Choose Save As… (Save To… on Mac) from the File menu. Then, in the panel that CINDEX displays, choose XML Records as the file type.
From the Finder (Mac) or Windows Explorer (Windows), you can duplicate any index document.

Whichever method you use, you should save the backup copy on a disk other than the one that contains the original.

I'm collaborating with another indexer, and we will need to exchange indexes for incorporation into a master index. What kind of files should we send each other?

The file types .ucdx and .ixml are interchangeable between CINDEX for Windows versions 3 or 4 and CINDEX for Mac versions 3 or 4.

I received an index as an email attachment and CINDEX could not open it. Why?

There are several possible causes. Check these points:

First, be sure to download or save the file to your local machine. Do not attempt to open a file directly from a cloud-based email platform.

Check that the email attachment has not had its name changed. CINDEX recognizes files that it can open by the presence of a filename extension as the last part of the name (e.g., .ucdx, .ixml, .arc). If the extension has been changed or removed, or has had additional text appended to it, CINDEX will not be able to identify and open the file. For more information on moving files between platforms, see the answer above.

Check that the file is in a format that CINDEX can open directly. CINDEX 3 or 4 can open index files (those with the filename extension .ucdx or .cdxf) and archived data (.arc) files. CINDEX can read .arc files made by any earlier version of CINDEX across platforms (Windows or Mac). CINDEX can also read full index files from earlier versions, but only if they were made on the platform you are currently using.

If you received a file with the filename extension .dat (an obsolete format used for interchange with DOS computers), you must first create a new index, then import the contents of the file by choosing Import… from the File menu.

We have just released CINDEX 4.2.4 for Mac and Windows

When you open your current CINDEX 4.2, the software will be automatically updated to the new version.

Note that this new version solves the incompatibility problems caused by the latest OS update for macOS 13 (Ventura).

If you happen to experience any issues, please contact us using our support form.

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As of 1-April-2024, CINDEX will no longer be available for purchase from this website. We’ve made the decision to open source the CINDEX product and make it freely available. You can read more about this change here.