Quark Forums

I called to ask about where to find resources (books, websites) and training materials (classes, eclasses) for the XML & DTD features advertised as part of QuarkXpress 6.

From sales, I was transferred to tech support, where I was told that Quark does/can not reccomend any training materials, and that if I wanted more information on learning to implement this functionality I should look for books on google.

Is anyone using the "XML and media-independent publishing" features in Quark - if so, what materials could you reccomend?

Thanks

Try this book "Real world quark Xpress 6 David Blatner" also read the pdf file name :"Guide to Avenue.quark".location for this file would be
hard drive->applications->quarkxpress 6.0->documents->"Guide to Avenue.quark.pdf "
on windows
c:-->program files-->quark xpress 6.0-->documents--> "Guide to Avenue.quark.pdf"

Is your interest primarily in importing XML content into XPress templates, or exporting finished documents to XML for repurposing?

JRS:
I may or may not hav the best of understandings about what Quark can do. Ideally what was envisioned is having our documents stored in XML and sharing a common DTD.

What I am hoping QuarkXpress will allow me to do is, export entire documents, complete with layout, from a typesetting application (XyEnterprise Production Publisher) into Quark and vica versa (basically making all documents here into single source).

------------------

quark_user:

Thanks for the tips, I will be taking a look at the PDFs as well as flipping through Blatner's book.

Certainly possible in theory. I don't know the product you refer to, but if can output valid XMl conforming to your DTD you can likely get there.

I have played with the XML import features, and there were limitations in XPress 5 with how sophisticated you could make the placeholder styling, the New in 6.0 doc says these are now more flexible. Have not played with this at all in XPress 6 (or export for that matter, I still use XPress 5 for what I do, which is convert print documents to XML, and not a ton of that though large files when I do them.)

As you probably realize, you have to be highly structured. The ideal case is a one-to-one mapping of XML elements to XPress style sheets; this is helpful in importing, and pretty much a must for exporting. And there are limitations in what XPress can do with entities and attributes in XML, so if your DTD is quite complex you may need to dumb down the XML you bring into XPress. (Again, based on pre-XPress 6 experience.)

The XML Import Guide.pdg covers creating placeholders and importing. The Guide to avenue.quark (in a different folder) goes over tagging rules and exporting. Took a quick glance at this and don't really see anything that looks different than in 5.0 for exporting.

All that said, not sure about the training part, but at this point you probably want to focus more on the feasibility of XPress for this project than the training side. If your XML knowledge is limited (as mine is, don't get scared) I'd suggest the XML Bible (see the author's site at http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ for lots of good links and info) or Black Book, and if any of the XPress 6 books have a decent XML section they'd probably be handy as well. http://www.xml.com/ has links to a wide variety of free and commercial XML resources.

BTW, where you say:

>> export entire documents, complete with layout

this might be a little optimistic. XML does not generally describe layout, unless you plan conditional application of XPress templates or styles based on specific contained attributes. In that case it might be doable, but you'd need some middle piece like AppleScript to examine these files and choose that template. Also don't think any of this is really scriptable now, so unattended creation of layouts may not be possible.

Good luck, John

John,

Thanks again for the reply, as of now I'm trying to determine if this project (to the scope that the boss dreams) is feasable, or if there is a close approximation of his dream that could be implemented. I will check out the resources you mentioned above - they are very much appreciated.

You mentioned that none of this is scriptable, now I'm not too familiar with the inner workings of Quark, but the Quark6 installations that are running are all on XP. Does Quark offer an SDK or Win based scripting language?

Thanks again!
- Thomas


:oops: I believe I got a bit ahead of myself when saying exporting layout as well as content.

Glad that was helpful. Sadly, I don't believe XPress yet has any VBScript or JavaScript support for Windows, I am pretty sure scripting is still AppleScript-only. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I also just tried to examine the AppleScript dictionary in 6.0 on OS X 10.3, and just get an error that the applicationcontains no script interface. Tried opening the app, the osax, and other files, and can find no way to do this, though scripts run. This is odd and would be a very big issue if I wanted to work in 6, off-topic but curious to me.

Again, good luck with your project, drop in and let us know how it goes if you get a chance.

- John

Hi,

I've been testing Quark's XML features for the past year with some of my company's XML. Only the very simple DTD structure seems to work. I haven't been able to get more complex DTD's to work. Quark's tech support has been involved and is helping us.

David Blatner's unit on XML in his Real World Quark 6 is the best one I've come across, but even David feels you need a lot of help (consultant-type) in making Quark's XML work. He also mentions a number of third-party XML XTensions that are available.

Quark has promised native round trip capabiliity in a future Quark upgrade (maybe Q7).

HTH,

Isaiah