Quark Forums

I'm trying to print a book that has 14 chapters, each of which is (obviously) a Quark project.

The relevant help page says "To print the entire book, make sure no chapters are selected. To choose one chapter, click it. To select consecutive chapters, press Shift while you click them."

This sounds as though it would print "the entire book" -- not "each chapter, one by one." However, what it actually does is ... print each chapter, one by one, into a separate PDF file.

Now, I can combine them in Acrobat, but there has got to be a way to do this in Quark. Right?

i'm having a similar problem. Although, I can't even get my individual chapters to print as pdfs.

I'm a bit worried as there has been no response to this issue!

Have you had any luck with this?

One would have thought that someone from Quark might have noticed this and commmented -- but No. Sorry. Still waiting.

Can't you make all the different PDFs and combine them into one in Acrobat? I know it's not the ideal answer but it is a work-around.

Mike

Um, yeah, I said that I could do that, and that's what I do.

It's not something that should be a workaround, though: either a book is a book and it can be manipulated as a unit, or it's not.

This is one of many serious defects in the "book" construct in Quark, and is one of the reasons I'm going to be trying InDesign for my next project: I mainly do books, and I have found Quark to be eminently unsuited to anything that requires more than one chapter.

The fact that nobody from Quark has bothered to answer this in -- how long has it been? 9 months? -- is indicative of how much they care about using Quark for book production.

I, too, am amazed that you haven't gotten a response on this. Unfortunately, I ran into the exact same problem without the benefit of being prepared for it by reading your post. Why on earth would Quark put time and effort into a "Book" feature if you can't work with it as a book?

I decided to try the book feature for the following reasons:

1) To keep the file sizes small and more manageable

2) To minimize the loss when (not IF, WHEN) Quark crashes, and a Recovered file may or may not be available

3) To use a common TOC list

4) To reuse a couple of chapters in a "mini-book"

#4, I found, is not possible, since it locks in a file to 1 book. You cannot assign a chapter to multiple books. Oh well.

Next, I have tried the "workaround" of combining the separate PDF files only to discover that the Table of Contents links thatare automatically put into the PDF don't link to anything, since the target is in a separate file! Even linking the PDF files together does not make this work. I have to drag-and-drop pages into one file and re-PDF anyway, so, again...

CAN SOMEBODY TELL ME ANY BENEFIT TO USING THE BOOK FEATURE? My guess is, no.

Guys, we can't print entire book as single PDF. May be Quark will look into it, have to continue adding PDFs of individual chapters in Acrobat :(

I have a solution to this problem!

A few years ago I designed and typeset a thousand page, twenty chapter book in Quark 6. I had all the chapters as seperate projects, that were held together in a Quark 'Book'. I was horrified when I found that I could not print all the chapters into a single Postscript file ,with the aim of converting it to PDF in Adobe Acrobat distiller. The book was due to go to print, and I thought I was finished!

The solution is to use a postcript concatenation (joining) utilty called Rundirex.txt  (Google rundirex.ps concatenation ps postscript to find more info). Rundirex.txt is a short text utilty that makes the Acrobat distiller gather together your selected separate postscript chapters.

Here is a step by step instruction:

1) Export your quark chapters by 'printing to file' as very high typesetting quality postscript (.ps) files.  (I believe that I used the Adobe Poscript Print Driver).

2) Find the rundirex.txt file in your Adobe Acrobat distiller Extras folder. (On my windows system it is in Program files/Adobe/Acrobat8.0/Acrobat/Xtras/). Probably best to search your Acrobat directory.

3)  Once all the chapters are printed to .ps format, open the rundirex.txt file in a text editor, and alter the sample paths and files to your needs. This should be self explanatory. My rundirex.txt file had a list of my 20 .ps chapter files, as well as the path to their directory on the hard disc.

4) Rename rundirex.txt to rundirex.ps. Open the altered rundirex.ps with Acrobat Distiller, and the rest is very easy. The PDF settings can be set to your needs. Also, certain page ranges can be selected - this was very useful when my printer could not read more than a few hundred pages at a time, so I split the 1000 page book into three PDFs.

5) Make sure you back-up your rundirex.ps file before you run it.

 

 

Please bear in mind this was the workaround used in Quark 6. Possibly, Quark now has decent PDF export options, but this method ensures that full control of the quality is maintained. It also saved me !

 

 

 Excellent advice from maliki.

I just wanted to add that combining separate pdfs in Acrobat can cause severe font problems at RIP with characters dropping or type scrunching.