Indexes and concordances
The terms ‘concordance’ and ‘index’ are not used in the same way by everybody. For the purposes of this web page, I use concordance for a list of occurrences of one word in its context and index for a list of several words, each word accompanied by one or more page references. There are several types of index (word index, language index, subject index, author index, citation index, etc.), but there’s just one type of concordance.
In InDesign you can create indexes, not concordances, though concordances can be scripted (see the concordance script, below). Indexes should be done manually by adding topics and page references using the Index panel. InDesign’s indexing is limited in that you can create just one index in a document, though with some trickery (to be outlined below) you can create, say, author, language, and subject indexes in one document.
Another approach to indexing in InDesign is to ignore its index feature entirely, using one or more scripts to find words from a word list and find all page references for each word. The first script listed here, under “Independent index from word list”, is an example.
Independent index from word list
The script creates an index from a word list, sidelining InDesign’s index altogether. It can be used for author, language, and citation indexes and similar indexes. For subject indexes it’s not particularly good, but it can be used to get a start. It runs on all open documents.
Create index (topics and page references) from a word list
https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/index_from_wordlist.html
Index page ranges
https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/index-page-ranges.html