I sometimes would like to split my alphabetical index into smaller ones.
This is the case when many entries have the same primary key, differing in second or third key. They end up grouped under the primary key. If the number of sub-entries is really large, I get more than a column worth of such sub-entries which disrupts the alphabetic stream of primary keys. This is confusing because the primary key is not repeated at top of column when there is a page break in the block of secondary keys. A second index with its title set to the “primary” key would be preferable both for quicker reference and for not cluttering the main index.
However, I don’t know how to do it.
If I select Custom Index while preparing my entries, I get in fact something akin to another table of contents (similar to Table index and the like), i.e. the entries appear in page order, not in key order. When the same key appears in several locations of the document, there will be several “entries” in the custom “index” sorted by their page number (with perhaps other entries in-between because they appear between the pages of the “entries”).
Example:
aa.........................1
bb.........................1
cc.........................1
aa.........................2
What I want is merge all entries pertaining to same key and display them in key order, just like:
aa.....................1,2
bb.......................1
cc.......................1
Apparently, Writer offers a single alphabetical index without the possibility to create custom ones.
Have I missed something? Is there a workaround?
Note: this has been the case for ages My latest stable version is 5.3.7.2 and there is still a single alpha-index.