exporting to Quark XPress Tags, minimal CSS

[Alibi Systems]

I've seen tons of posts about the poor ability of FMPro 7 to export anything really useful to Quark Xpress, but no answers to the dilemma. Here's one, an old-fashioned Filemaker hack:

Strategy: Using GetAsCSS as a springboard, do a series of substitutes and manipulations to get usable Quark text. (Resulting field doesn't contain paragraph styles. It's just raw text with Xpress Tags-compliant local formatting.)

In the process, we also end up with a Minimal CSS text field, which strips out all font declarations except for bold, italic, super- and subscript. Useful for fields where users paste data in from various sources. (You don't want the blue underlined text, but you do want the bold and italic.) This calculation also replaces

with

, which may not be desirable for others.

Minimal CSS text

Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( GetAsCSS ( TextSize ( TextFont ( TextColor ( TextStyleRemove ( FIELDNAME ; Condense + Extend + Strikethrough + SmallCaps + Titlecase + WordUnderline + Underline + DoubleUnderline ) ; RGB ( 0 ; 0 ; 0 ) )  ; "Helvetica" ) ; 12 ) ) ; "font-family: 'Helvetica';" ; "" ) ; "color: #000000;" ; "" ) ; "font-size: 12px;" ; "" ) ; "

" ; "
" ) ; "text-transform: none;" ; "" ) ; "letter-spacing: normal;" ; "" ) ; "font-variant: normal;" ; "" ) ; "text-decoration:none;" ; "" )

XTG text

Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Substitute ( Minimal CSS text ; "" ; "" ) ; "" ; "" ) ; "" ; "" ) ; "" ; "<->" ) ; "" ; "" ) ; "" ; "" ) ; "" ; "" ) ; "" ; "<+>" ) ; "¶" ; "" ) ; "" ; "" ); "" ; "" ); "" ; "" ); " " ; "<$>" ); "" ; "" ); "
" ; "¶" )

The are two hitches with the XTG result

1. Special characters are still in escaped HTML format, which is not good for Quark. My solution involves a script which runs on the exported file to replace all escaped characters with the correct character set equivalents. You could just as easily write a huge nested substitute in Filemaker to change all Eacutes and so on to their original characters. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

2. The Substitute produces superfluous <$> tags, but they're still legal Xpress Tags syntax.

If anybody wants a copy of my shell script, it's available.

Edited March 31, 2006 by Guest