Quark, Indesign

[trinkaltbier]

After a couple hours of Internet searching, I have decided to post my delimma here.

We publish a newspaper with 7 different editors across the country. We used to import Word files into Quark, but 1) production got sick of being bombarded with Word emails and 2) importing Word files brings in all sorts of extra styles and screw up our styles.

I found and started using a nifty program called DiStyler from Abstrakt, which lets you export Quark tagged documents from FileMaker to individual text files and thus maintains your bolding, italization, etc, when imported into Quark. We use FileMaker Server for the editors to post their stories and then production outputs them when ready...

Now the delimma:

We are itching to move to InDesign and InDesign does not accept Quark tagged text.

A member of the Adobe forum said I should just change the plug in to export InDesign tags. The maker of DiStyler has split and his website does not function anymore, so I cannot ask him to do that. If I knew how, I'd open the plug in and change it to the IDD tag structure (am I allowed to do that? How do you do that?)

I was also thinking I could get the text to export in styled XML: but I do not know how to do that either.

I have looked for alternatives to what we are doing now, but they all come at great expense per seat. If someone knows of a very low cost alternative, please let me know! We are but a small grass roots enterprise.

[trinkaltbier]

Anybody???

[The Shadow]

FM7 natively supports converting styled text into Cascading Style-Sheet style, the calculation:

GetAsCSS(textField)

converts colors, font and size information to CSS. You could download the trial of FM7 and see if that could be made to work with InDesign (which I know nothing about - sorry).

There is also a similar new function:

GetAsSVG(textField)

that might be more useful with XML, I don't know much about SVG.

[George TOUBALIS]

One Quark Xpress user in Macwolrd forum said:

Having the guidelines followed translates into having Word files flow into the page layout application so that I have as little B.S. formatting to do as possible. For example, I insist on precise names for paragraph styles, and I issue templates and stationary pad files with paragraph styles embedded. Thus, I can create QXP paragraph styles of the same name, but with different formatting. On importing text, I overwrite Word styles with QXP's. Behold! That grunt work is done.

George

[George TOUBALIS]

I fount also this:

When Apple gave us desktop publishing, they boasted that you could produce documents with no codes. Well, codes are back and they prove that a timesaver is a timesaver. If you use Style Sheets regularly and work with structured documents such as magazines, books and newsletters, tagging your word processing file can be a real timesaver because it cuts formatting time in Quark.

Tagging puts codes in your text file that automatically apply a pre-designed Style Sheet when input to Quark. After you have designed your document, decide on the various Style Sheets that are needed, and create them as a Quark Template, you can then insert the Style Sheet names as tags in your word processing file instead of having to create separate styles in your word processor.

Don't mix style tags with the word processing styles or you'll inadvertently add them to your Quark document.

Tagging a word processing document is very easy. Just place the style name in the document preceded by the "at" symbol (@) and followed by a colon (:. For example, @Articletext: is a style name code that matches a QuarkXPress "Articletext" style in the destination document. The tag must be inserted at the beginning of the paragraph to which the style will be applied, and it remains in force throughout the paragraph.

Once a new tag is inserted, it remains in force until it is changed by the insertion of a new style tag. If you have several paragraphs with the same style, you will only have to insert the tag in front of the first paragraph.

Tags can be added as you type text or inserted after the text has been typed. To automate this job, you can use Copy and Paste in the word processing document, or use Glossaries or Macros to insert style codes.

For straight paragraph tagging, it is even faster if your word processor has an outlining function which can condense the text to only the first line of each paragraph.

When printing at 300 dots-per-inch (on a standard laser printer), the dots of the division-sign character () often appear to be touching the horizontal bar. If you use them frequently, this can be a problem. To solve it, create a new gure from scratch. Just type a colon (: and an EN dash (-). Then kern the two together to overlap.

George

In Design is slow.... ha ha ha !!!