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

[Frank Stearns]

On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Kenneth C. Benson wrote:

> What you want is called a concordance, and I think Ixgen will do this 
> (http://www.fsatools.com/). Someone should confirm this. I've never used it.

Indeed, IXgen will do this (among many other things), but not in the 
traditonal sense of a concordance (we stayed away from offering 
conventional concordance building tools, because fairly bad "indexes" 
are often the result).

That said, the best IXgen tool for this particular task would be 
"Markers from Keywords".

You would set up a list of your names, what you want to put in a 
marker when the name is found (by default the search string is also 
the marker content -- but you can change this). You can also indicate 
the marker type to use, which would be a good way to keep this 
list separate from your main index entries.

You could have IXgen do this automatically, or you could have it do 
the process interactively, where you can see the context of each 
"find" and (a) skip it, (b) accept it and insert the new marker, (c) 
modify the marker text to be used at the particular find, or (d) 
select from a drop-down list of marker string choices that has been 
built from your previous on-the-fly modifications.

IXgen is pretty slick with the marker creation process. Other 
creation tools include markers from paragraph tags and markers from 
character tags.

IXgen is also very good at supporting your marker editing tasks, such 
as spell checking, unification of markers, making subentries, and so 
on.

We invite the original poster to take a look with a fully functional 
demo at www.fsatools.com. (For some reason, the original post never 
showed up in our inbox.)

Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r)
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>> 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