Quark Forums

QuarkXPress 8.15 – is there any possibility to find a text inside a document according to a "track amount"? F.e. if I wanna find a text having track amount less than -2? Thanks in advance.

Hi! What would you like to do exactly? What kind of text are you working on? Are you on a Mac or a PC (if on a Mac, AppleScripts can do a lot - even if they can't do everything). Is the tracking applied to entire words only or is it applied to pairs of characters within words?

Thanks for the replay. I'm working on Mac. I just wanna search for and find even (as you write) pairs of characters within words. This could be very useful for me when checking documents from other people. The AppleScript would be a good decision, but I don't know anything about it but it exists. :-) However - if AppleScript will solve this, I'll try to learn more about it.

Hum! OK I think there are 2 different words for 2 differnet realities: tracking for words and kerning for pairs of letters. Am I right? If so did you know you can remove manual kerning automatically? Utilities > Remove manual kerning (this is typically for removing manual kerning whatever amount it is). But maybe you're searching for sth totally different.

Anyway, if you'd like to do sth with words whose tracking is "-2" here is a code to get you in:

tell application "QuarkXPress7.5"
     activate
     tell document 1
          tell current box
               tell story 1
                    --get the track of every word
                    tell (every word whose track is "-2")
                         set track to "0" -- or other stuff
                    end tell
               end tell
          end tell
     end tell
end tell

 EDIT: Yes, that's it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning. So my script is OK for tracking, not kerning. I can't seem to figure out how to get kerned pairs of letters thru AS. Maybe Scripting_Ace will come to our rescue

 

The kern property appears to be associated with the first letter in a given pair. If I enter the word test and kern -3 between e and s, then e has a kern value of -3 from AppleScript, st has a kern of 0. (That is consistent with the dictionary definition, which says "kerning of the first character of this text" for the kern property, but I also confirmed it using the Explorer mode in Script Debugger, a superb tool for helping understand the property hierarchy.)

I would still look to Scripting Ace for the most efficient way to check a sizable chunk of text for kerning properties, though. I don't seem to have the knack for proper construction of those "every text whose..." type statements.

Hi bobes,

another possibility for finding tracking could be saving text as XPress Tags and searching for it in any text editor with good searching capabilities:

<v8.10><e8>
@Normal=<Ps100p100t0Y1h100z12k0b0cKf"Helvetica"n0o("Calt","liga","locl")L0G0>
@Normal=[Sp"","Normal","Normal"]<*L*AL*h"Standard"*s"None"*m"None"*kn0*kt0*ra0*rb0*d0*p(0,0,0,0,0,0,g(P,S))>
@$:Ker<k-2>n<k$>Kern
<t-2>Track<t$>

Note: As JRS correctly points out, the kern value is applied to the "n" here and the shift in characters therefore appears between the n and the K: "KernKern".

For removing manual kerning there's also a menu item under "Utilities". For removing all of the tracking it is probably best to use an AppleScript (see above).

Regards
Matthias

That's also what I understood from the Dictionary. I wonder if an attack-angle to catch those pairs would not be to list all the characters then to check the 1st one and then to go on with the rest of the list (rest; get; list of any; All items of the list excluding the first.) in a loop. This said, if working on a huge file I would definately abandon it! Unless it is absolutely necessary to do stuff on specific pairs accross the story.

Oops! sorry Matthias I was answering JRS of course! Your approach is certainly much more efficient I think. One so often search the solution within Quark when the best would lay in a workaround through another app! (I must say I would never thought of exploring XPress tags actually!) Thanks for the input!