Quark Forums

I'm currently upgrading my 4.1 files to 6.1. I also need to save them as XML.

I've created my DTD and in the process of mapping the Style Sheets to the XML elements.

Once this has been done, is there a way for me to automatically (batch) convert these files? (there are over a 1000 files, so the easier the better)

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

thanks - Fruber.

There's Quark's aveneue XTension and also a number of third-party XTs. To get the best suggestions, you might describe your files a bit more.

Are these files of similar layout? How many text flows per document need extraction? Are you confident that styles are consistent across your whole repository? How complex is the DTD / story structure in terms of various elements and attributes?

I extract catalogs to XML using avenue, and have some familiarity with other products. Avenue does not offer the automation features some of the other products do, but if everything is very consistent some creative use of QuicKeys and AppleScript could probably handle this with just your oversight for problems during processing.

The DTD is rather complex, but fortuntely the files are of similar layout and the styles are consistant.

The simpliest way to describe the content is in the form of converting several newspapers that were created by the same person using the same styles for each of the sections, some papers having many tables, images, other being more simple article related. Needing to convert those from 4.1 to 6 first, then mapping them to the DTD (or whatever that process is called) - then saving the resulting XML file. There's no need to keep the XML and Quark file sych'ed. Instead I could just batch them as needed. (Of course if there is no such automation - I'll inform the publishing dept to start using 6.1 instead of 4.1.)

(note, all XP users)

I've only started the work on one file - I'm hoping that I won't have to manually open each file, then apply this custom template to each one, then save it. Especially since I hear it supports scripting - I would assume some script or macro would perform this task.

thanks - Fruber.

The avenue XT does not support scripting. The main application does, but only appleScript on Mac OS, and the support does not extend to features added via XTensions. (XTensions can be scriptable, but none of the Quark ones except Scripting are, AFAIK.)

There are no automation features in avenue either. There are reusable XML templates; once I have done the text transformations necessary to the files I receive to ensure style consistency, I make a new XML file from my template, drag the main text flow to this, and let the parser do its thing.

Quark also has a Sequence XT that lets you select different boxes in a document and create a named sequence structure out of them. You can then drag that sequence on the avenue palette to have it all tagged at once, effectively treated like a single text flow (and supporting extraction of picture references as well.)

But to achieve true automation with avenue, you'd need to employ some clever combined use of scripting and a macro application. The ability to do this is directly dependent on the patterns (styles used, box locations, box names if tagged with such) in your documents to make them amenable to automatic processing. If there are multiple stories in a file, what would permit the software to recognize which boxes make up a unique story group?

If your interest is mostly in automation and batch processing, look at some of the third-party offering. I'd suggest you get some demos, maybe provide some sales people with a sample file or two to get their input, and try to run some live tests on these. Some one is going to have to actually try this with your files to figure out what will work to handle them.

Check out WebXPress at Gluon, they mention automation abilities for the pro version - see http://www.gluon.com/

There's also a product called Atomik XT, http://www.easypress.com

And iCPS from PCI at http://www.pcipage.com/ has some nice features (I've worked with this a little bit, only know the others from demos.)

Good luck,

- John