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Bookend Indexer

The ultimate horror for a desktop publisher using PageMaker 3.0 is the end of the year index for a series of newsletters. In most cases, embedded graphics and the design of the newsletter make it impossible to use a word processor to generate the index (if the original word processor can generate indices at all). So back to the tried and true methods of hand generation.

Sonar Bookends from Virginia Systems should put an end to that tedious chore, though. Sonar Bookends will automatically generate a list of every word in the document with the corresponding page numbers. That list can then be edited to remove words you don’t want in the index or table of contents. Alternately, you can provide Sonar Bookends with a list of words and/or phrases to index and save the time spent culling the common words from the master index. The advanced features of Sonar Bookends can create a multi-level index with an unlimited number of levels, create an index with chapter references with the chapters being in different files, and use boolean operations and wildcards in the index generation.

If you were wondering, and you probably were, supported document formats include: PageMaker, FullWrite Professional, MacWrite, MacWrite II, Microsoft Word, WriteNow, WordPerfect, Microsoft Works, Ready Set Go 4, text (Nisus files are text files so they are supported as well.), and MS-DOS text. As an added bonus, Sonar Bookends is A/UX compatible.

Virginia Systems has two other products, Sonar and Sonar Professional, that also generate indices, but they are general-purpose text retrieval utilities and are priced much higher than Sonar Bookends’ $79.95 list price. Sonar Bookends requires one megabyte of RAM and can run in the background under MultiFinder. We suspect that the speed with which Sonar Bookends generates the index or table of contents depends on the speed of Mac, but no information concerning the minimum or ideal system was mentioned.

Virginia Systems — 804/739-3200

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