Quark Forums

HI,

I've been using Quark for about 6 years now (4 years professionally) laying out books for print, but until recently I've been asked to design and layout for the amazon kindle. Since i work with print, i've never needed to work or look into "tags".

has anyone had any experience with layouting books for both print and kindle? if so, could you point me in the right directions.Thanks! - GB

Hi,

I've been some little experience for kindle project. If you using Indesign CS4 there is a feature for export in Dreamweaver. The export the file in xhtml format. After this you can use a free toll available in net. Product name is 'Mobipocket creater' you download this utilities and export the xhtml file into kindle format.

After this u can not seeing style information. So this task u can edit your xhtml. In xhtml top level Indesign define a empty css u can edit css and then convert into kindle format u can see your mobi book looks good.

 Regards

Pramod Pant

(India)

Hi, GB,

you do not state which version of QuarkXPress you use, on which platform you work and what kind of "tags" you need to create.

If you just need HTML or XHTML, then it is easily created out of QuarkXPress 7 or 8:

• Convert your print layout into a web layout (layout > duplicate). Duplication has the advantage that you can keep your print layout in the same project and synchronize styles, designs and even content.
• Adds hyperlinks and anchors (no need to own/use Dreamweaver) if that's what you mean by "tags"
  
• Export as HTML or XHMTL (file > export > HTML)

 

Or if you need PDF, just take your print layout and add hyperlinks and export as PDF (no need for Distiller). Make sure you check the "include hyperlinks" option in your PDF Export style.

If you do that on a regular base, you might want to check out the automation possibilities QuarkXPress Server gives you.

Best
Matthias

Unfortunately,

Your answer is woefully insufficient. Using Quark 7.5x, I get a separate html page for every book page in my quark layout when I export html. Nor would Quark 8 seem to rectify this by allowing a user to redefine a layout so it is considered one huge scrollable stream. This is an impasse. Please tell us how to tell Quark it is to regard a print document as a single page.

Meanwhile, for those needing to prepare existing Quark scripts for ebook publication, I suggest that you export your manuscript as an rtf file which you then process with Word or Word Perfect. I prefer the latter because it has great search and replace tools. Before you export, simply add a marker where you want to lock in an image: I use the image title tagged with XYZ. (i.e. title.jpegXYZ). This make it easy to search the rtf document for each XYZ tag. When you do, you jump from one image to the next. At each stop you simply paste <IMG SRC=" in front of the image title. (i.e. <IMG SRC="title.jpegXYZ) Once you've tagged every image, and you can globally replace XYZ with ">. (i.e. <IMG SRC="title.jpeg">) Etcetera. Is this tedious: Guaranteed, this will have your chain smoking something. But it works. Keep in mind the Kindle 2 and kin are primitive displays.

 

I am having same woes. Kindle's requirements are so different from most other eBooks!! I read that Kindle does not like CSS, and does not support Tables. Just a bare bones HTML file... But when I export my Quark ms as HTML I get one with CSS and tables galore. So far, it seems far better to stay in Print Layout and do File > Save Text > where you can choose Entire Story, and format as HTML. This gives you a fairly clean version of all the text in HTML (not separate pages for each book). However, you still have to go in manually and place all the images... a royal pain! Is there any way to get around this? Anyone come up with a cleaner solution to go from Quark to Kindle?