How to generate an index of names without markers (or by automated insertion of markers)

[Björn Mattsson]

Hi all.

I have received a request from a client, late in a huge book project, to
generate an index with all of the names of people that are mentioned in the
book. We have been supplied with a list of names and the client thinks that
we can just "press a button" to compile the index. This is not the case of
course, but the client insists that it should be done.

What I am looking for is a way to locate a name in the document, find out
the page number and then create an index looking like this:

Adams, Douglas 42
Bradbury, Ray 451
Dumas, Alexandre 20, 45

etc.

I am fairly experienced Framemaker user but I can not come up with a way of
doing this without inserting (Author) markers for every instance where one
of the listed names occur in the text. This would be hundreds of places, and
we would have to view each page manually. 

I have tried my best to come up with some (semi)automated way of achieving
this but the only thing I can think of would be to save the document as mif
and write some sort of script that parses the text file inserting marker
elements where it finds any of the listed names. Probably time consuming,
and highly unsafe or at least unpredictable.

My question to all you experts is if there is any way to get this done using
Framemaker itself, or a plug-in for Framemaker, or using any other tool you
might think of.

For this project we use Framemaker 7.2.

Thanks for any input,
Björn Mattsson
Sweden