Sonar Bookends Professional
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Proper Noun List

If you need to index proper nouns contained within your word/phrase list or from a PDF, Sonar Bookends Professional can generate this for you automatically as well. My personal experience is that it does a really good job on the first pass, and I usually only have to spend a few minutes giving it the once over to eliminate collected proper nouns that I don't need to index. This type of list is generated using rules of capitalization and punctuation.

Figure 4 The difference between a proper noun list and a subject list is that a proper-noun list does not have as many filtering options as a subject list, it is not English-language dependent, and each word in a proper-noun list must start with a capitalized letter (subjects may or may not be capitalized).

Word Frequency List

With the word-frequency function, you can cull your word/phrase list or generate from the PDF a list based on the how often the word appears. The list will be filtered based on the maximum frequency of the words. If a word appears too frequently to be useful, it is not included in the final index. This filtering system works really well, but sometimes requires a couple of passes to get the proper threshold worked out. You want to be sure to set the frequency high enough to omit words such as the, and, but, and similarly oft-used words, but not so high that it doesn't pick up words that may be common (and critical) in your document. As an example, in this document, the word Sonar appears very often, but it is also critical. My threshold needs to ensure that I include this word, but omit others.

Figure 5 Using word-frequency automation, you can trim your word/phrase list or list from PDF by omitting very common words. With a bit of tweaking, you should be able to find just the right threshold.

Making good lists from okay lists

Before you begin the process and prompt Sonar Bookends Professional to generate the page numbers associated with the words and phrases contained within your document, it's a good idea to optimize the list. Choose index > optimize word/phrase list and you will be provided with these two check boxes as options for minimizing (merging) the found occurrences of singular and plural entries and overlapping phrases.

Figure 6 A quick optimization may save you hours of merging entries.

Overlapping phrases is actually a really great feature set, but far too detailed for this article. Click here to download the Sonar Bookends Professional manual and turn to page 56.

Last names first

With Sonar Bookends Professional, you can actually swap the positions of first and last names — completely automatically. With very little intervention, you can even account for titles (such as Jr., MD., and so on) and two-word last names (such as von Trump). If you have names that you don’t want reversed, add a plus sign (+) in front of the first character of the name (directly in your word/phrase list). These leading plus signs are deleted automatically after the list is reversed, so you won't need to worry about them getting in the way.

Figure 7a Using the Order word/phrase list as "last name, first name" feature, you can easily and automatically alphabetize your proper nouns list as last name first.

Figure 7b In this list, I have a collection of names (first name followed by last name).

Figure 7c In this screen grab of the same list, I have used the feature that changes the order from first name-last name to last name, comma, first name — and I never typed a single keystroke.

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