Hello all
I have been using quark for years and have "always" been a devout promoter of the software. It has its drawbacks, like all things. Its spell checking in comparison to something like Word is a no brainer. Yet Quark was not designed to for grammer/spelling checking (even thought that is a huge part of any layout program) and this is what most of the designers will tell you. If it wasent so easy to have the writers use Word and import the text into Quark when done. this would be a problem.
I can not agree more with the previous post as to QuarkXpress support. It sucks big time. Since they have quit giving support for version 4, this is the ONLY place I can get help. Dont get me wrong, the help here has usually been very good and has never gone unanswered (yet) over the years.
So this is the best I am going to get as far as suppoort goes for my version of Quark 4.
I am currently having to consider a complete hardware/software upgrade for the entire publishing office. That is going to cost a lot of money and time. As I analyse the cost to productivity, I am sad to say that Quark is going to be replaced with InDesign. The reason I come to this conclusion is similar to the previous post that pointed out Quark (over the years) has lost its huge edge in the page layout market. With each revision of Quark I see totally useless features added while major page layout features are ignored.
With that said, here is the most frustrating feature that has been on the wish list table for a very long time and is totally ignored by the quark designers. Its called "STYLE MODELS".
I have used style sheets from many different programs and Quark has exellent style sheet functionallity. Yet over the years, they have remained the same. I have posted before they need to create more powerful style sheets that enable you to create style "models" and special characters that would allow you the change character styles in the "same" paragraph.
I will give an example of a program that IMHO has fantastic and very powerfull style sheet capabilities, its called MultiAdCreator. Anyone who has used this program knows that it is not in any way a pagelayout program. Its an ad creating program. IMHO I do not know the difference between building ads and building a page layout in the sense that the page layout is just a big ad. MultiAdCreator does not handle multipage stuff very well.
Anyway, this program has the text/item styling features that are second to none. The only other program I have seen that does this kind of styling is a proprietary program from Harris Publishing, called the PLS system. The Harris program is very expensive and is usually outside the small publishing office budget. MutiAdCreator is relatively cheap, but, you will not be able to make it work like Quark. So I am begging for Quark designers to consider the following example in future releases. I may reconsider Quark if this happens, otherwise, even though InDesign doest not offer the feature either I will use it for many other reasons.
STYLE SHEETS AND HOW THEY "SHOULD" BE DESIGNED
Lets say you have a simple classified section where there is one paragraph as a header, then the next paragraph is a smaller font/leading etc. There is only 2 paragraphs, but in the second paragraph the first few words are bold and the rest is not. Some paragraphs may have 2 words, others may have 4 words bolds etc. So it is not fixed on how many words are bold before the style changes back to a regular font style. If you have several hundred paragraphs using this style, you will have to select "all" the words that you want bold and manually change them to bold or use a character style sheet. Either way you still "must" select the bold portions and the first header paragraph. ie: select all - apply the regular text style to all the text, then manually place the cursor in the headers and apply the header styles to them. Then manually "select" the words in the beggining of the second paragraph to make them bold or apply another character style sheet. I have done this for years, once its done its is great and works fine, but if someone comes along and messes it up, you will most likely have to redo the whole thing.
This is where the "major" problem comes in. You should be able to "select all" the text and apply a "style model" to the entire text. Lets even disregard the bold words in the beggining of the second paragraph and just say that there are two paragraphs in the model. The first one is the bold header 12pt, the second paragraph is the 10pt regular copy. When applied to a group of paragraphs it uses the paragraphs found in the text to "know" when to switch styles. This would provide an exponitial time saver when applying multiple styles to multiple paragraphs.
This is where Quark has lost me, it is unbelieveable that the designers seems to be totally unaware of users who have to style hundreds of pages of text. Below is an example of how you could do something like this in MultiAdCreator.
Lets say we have an anchored art box with an art header. (first paragraph)
A bold type head of 12 pt type all bold (second paragraph)
A regular type of 10 pt first few words bold (third paragraph)
A bold line with leaders flush right, say a price with superior $ (fourth paragraph)
----------------
| Art |
----------------
All BoldBold Bold reg-
ular regular r-
eguler....
(leaders)....
$234First I would create the paragraph style for the art box.
Create the style to the second paragraph.
Create the style for the third paragraph, BUT, I also insert a special character after the last word I want bold to indicate that the character style should now change to regular when it sees this special character. (I can define this character to be "any" character, including invisible ones, it also allows me an option to remove the special character after the style is applied, even though i would never want to do this, you could if you wanted to.)
Create the style for the fourth paragraph using the same technique above for the superior $. Here I "can" use the special character "$" to indicate when to make the style change then change back after.
Once these four styles have been created, then I can create the Style Model.
The Style Model allows me to select which styles to include in the model. Once I have created the model I can apply it to "all" the text in ONE click. After I have applied the style model to all the text, it is easy to see where a missing paragraph is located or an extra paragraph has been added. Simply remove/add the paragraph, select all, reapply the style model and go to the next one. Thats power. And Quark should have something like this.
The MultiAdCreator style models saved me a ton of time. With this type of "style model" you can style thousands of paragraphs using multiple character and paragraph styles all in one shot.
Thank you for your time, and I sure hope Quark gets back to top dog in the pagelayout market. But, I am still going to go with InDesign in the near future. :shock:
John Gardner