Quark Forums

My name is Ray Wright and have worked for 25 years in pre-press, only at three companies.
Have 18 years experience in catalogues, now working for Screwfix.

Unfortunately my Quark skills are minimal most of my background has been command coded
typesetting (CCI Europe) and STIBO CATALOG PIM/PM/STEPXPRESS.

My question is about flagging data in QUARK documents for reporting on. A typical scenario
is our price tables and use of prices in text. Our STIBO database allows tables to be mounted
in QUARK as text boxes (not tab delimited), it is very hard to associate one box to another i.e.
very difficult to associate the order code with the price.

Is there a way I can tag or flag data for reporting on?

I was hoping to flag the order code with something that will NOT print on the page nor add
horizontal white space but can still be reported on. On average our A5 double page spreads
contain around 450 text boxes, all linked back to the database.

I am very interested to receive any ideas.

You can try to make a character style for the order code and have this text differently (spot)coloured. Before printing you set the opacity of the character style ‘ColourCode ’ to 0% so it won’t print. If you can figure out to have this colourcode in the margins next to the table, it makes it easier to associate it with the price and won’t influence the rest of the table. Kjeld

 Hi Ray,

 

I am not sure I fully understand your workflow but here are some thoughts on the subject in general.

As Kjeld indicated, you can have a specific Style Sheet applied to "hide" the text when necessary. We often use this technique when making workbooks where the answer are set on a 5th plate. It is then just a matter of teeling our printer that we want 15 000 copies of the workbook made of the first 4 plates and 500 teacher's handout made of all the 5 plates. CAUTION, this technique requires that all items set in that 5th color be also set to overprint.

Other solution may involve setting the targeted content on a separate layer that can be toggled on and off.

There is also a flag you can toggle on the box themselves setting them to print or not.

Lastly, you did not disclosed how your documents get generated (or on which platform) but should you use something like Xtags, you can name the boxes themselves and at a later point run a script that will act on thosenamed boxes.

 Hope this helps!