Now that we’ve got the basic indices out of the way in Eclipse, it’s time to explore objection and certified question indices. Not all court reporters need to index these, but it’s helpful to know how to do it just in case.
We already explored the anatomy of an index code and how to create a new file in Eclipse in previous posts, so I’ll just jump to creating these custom indices.
To start, create a new block file with the name of the index you want to create. Let’s start with certified questions or questions that the witness has been instructed not to answer.
First, while you’re in this new document, you need to click the Settings button, go to the Paragraphs tab, click the radio button for Master Format, choose a paragraph style that is NOT used in any of your other index template files, and click “Advanced” and then change the values to the right to the ones that you need to have in your index for the page, line number, and–if necessary–the question itself. The index block file in the image below (which was called “xONotAnswered”) uses the settings in the 0 Style paragraph style as shown.
In the example above, both the left margin and the text column have the same position, and there is no indentation. That means that there will be a paragraph of text at position 17 that has no indentation either forward or backward, as shown in the example above the “Advanced” button.
Next, click “Advanced..” then “Tab stops.” Add tab stops at the appropriate number of characters, click all the “OK”s, “Close”s, and “Save”s you need to to get out of the Settings. The example paragraph style has tab stops at 4 and 12 characters, and I will show you later what that looks like. For now, we are going to look at the index coding for the Block file that will be brought in while writing.
The index title in this example is xONotAnswered, there is no item name, and it is going to pull all text from the line below it (minus the Q.) into the 0 Style paragraph type. Then it will insert the page number at tab stop 1, right justified, and the line number at tab stop 2, also right justified.
To add the Q (or Q.) to the index, change the index coding Block file (in this case, noanswer.ecl) so that the second pair of pipes has <Q >* in between, like this:
In: xONotAnswered||0 Style|<Q >*|{TR:1}{P}{TR:2}{L}
There should be two spaces between the Q (or the period, if you want to add that) and the greater-than sign (>).
This is what the codes will look like in a transcript (not exactly–this is just a dummy I made up using Lorem Ipsum). Notice that the codes for the actual questions not answered are ABOVE the question paragraphs, not below them. You’ll need to insert the file with the code in it at the end of the answer paragraph above the question that the witness has been instructed not to answer.
I’ll generate this index, just to make sure we get what we want.
This is how it turns out with the Q added:
So far so good. Now we just need to add the headers for the index. Eclipse might do this when you generate the index, as long as you have the index header file in your Block files area along with the actual index file. I actually don’t have them in my block files–just a separate file folder–so Eclipse didn’t generate the headers for me with the index itself.
To add the headers in manually, put your cursor right at the end of <<Index Start>> and insert the file xONotAnswered.ecl.
Tada!
Now, all you have to do is insert noanswer.ecl while you’re editing and then generate that index with all the others.
If you don’t need the question itself in the index, you’ll have to adjust your code in the index coding Block file (noanswer.ecl in this case) to leave out the asterisk, and you’ll have to redo the scan stops for the paragraph style you chose as well as redoing your index header Block file (xONotAnswered.ecl in this case) to reflect where the columns for PAGE and LINE start (more centered). Let’s see what that looks like below.
In your settings, in the Paragraphs tab, change both the Master Format and the Current Document settings for your chosen paragraph style to the appropriate ones. In the example below, notice that the left margin, index, and text column are all at the same setting, 20 characters. This will start the text close to the middle of the page.
If you also add Tab Stops (Advanced–>Tab Stops) at 24 and 32 characters, it should make an index that looks like this:
You will also need to modify the coding in your index coding Block file (noanswer.ecl in this case) to exclude the question by deleting the asterisk (*) between the two pipes (|) after the paragraph style part of your code, thus:
In: xONotAnswered||0 Style||{TR:1}{P}{TL:2}{L}
In the code above, Eclipse will ONLY include the page number at the first scan stop and the line number at the second. It will not include any text either before or after those numbers.
Okay, that’s how to auto-index questions that the witness has been instructed not to answer (and/or certified questions). But how do you auto-index objections? The same exact way, except using different file names. Usually objections are page and line number only, so you would use the same basic code as the one I used three paragraphs ago, but you would need to change both the index name (before the first pipe) and the paragraph style (after the second pipe and before the third) to reflect that it is your objections index.
Now that we’ve covered auto-indexing in it’s entirety for each of the three CAT packages I use, I would like to know what aspect(s) of scoping and/or proofreading you are having trouble with when it comes to software. Please tell me in the comments below what you would like me to cover next.