Quark Forums

Hello,

I am new to QuarkXpress and everything publishing. I am a full time math teacher and also a mother and I am writing a math workbook for the past two years, and I am doing everything from scratch (creating the exercises, sketching using Affinity Designer, Math Magic for equations and formulas) and learning the software at once as I go with my book project. I already have hundreds of pages and need a few hundreds more. Since my book is getting big, I am having some issues with manually handling all this book. For example, I have 100 lessons, and I need to add a new lesson after Lesson 20 which means Lesson 21 will become 22 and so on. I have to change the # of the Lesson manually for all the Lessons that go after which is time consuming because sometimes I am adding more lessons. Another problem is that I like to add notes on many exercises throughout the book telling the student to refer to a previous lesson on "x" page for review; however, because I am adding lessons or pages in between, then the page # change and then my notes don't match the specific page I want.

Is there anyway I can automate this to save lots of time?

I know there is an Xtension called Kytek Autopage which is designed to work with textbooks and make things easier.
First, I have not found any training online/videos on how to use Kytek. I e-mailed Kytek to ask for the price for a Personal Edition and to my surprised they told me it is $7,500. This is almost 9 times what I paid for QuarkXpress ! I would not mind paying $750, but an extra zero to the price is way too much for me because I am not a publishing house. I am just working slowly on my book because I work full time and also have to dedicate time to my 4 year old son plus house chores, cooking, gardening, etc.

Thanks for the advice

Hi Yadith,

that's hard to say without seeing the project and yes, there are great 3rd party automation solutions around QuarkXPress.

It depends what you want to automate. E.g. "page reference" is a feature of QuarkXPress 2018, so you can have QuarkXPress change the reference automatically when the referenced text moves to another page.

Thanks
Matthias

Thank you very much. I will try “Page Reference”. I did not know about that.

Also check out Martin Turner's YouTube video series that covers much of Quark 2017/2018. I think there are a couple in there that illustrate how to use Content Variables and Automated Numbering. Also look at using the Books feature to manage each lesson as a "book chapter"; that should make it easier to move the lessons around and maintain the expected numbering sequence.

Martin Turner YouTube list
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... i-pLNrwXMO

I found the answer to my own question regarding Automating some functionalities with Autopage. I found a book online that teaches Autopage 6 by Darryl J. Keck. I bought it and began reading it, and I on page 5 it says that it is not cost effective to use Autopage in books like " ... or high school math book where each page is styled according to manuscript pages and doesn't follow the design to spec." This is what I am writing, a high school math workbook where different lessons are formatted different according to the content/diagrams/tables/etc.

Thank you for your responses and the "page reference" and Martin Turner. I watched a lot of his videos and bought the book.