Anyone have knowledge or experience with this magical software? I had Mark Z's Quark fixer-upper utility in the 1990s. It saved my butt numerous times.

I'm still getting old book layouts in Quark 3 and 4 from my book publishing clients, usually just needing copyright page updates and minor revisions. Last year I took the really really old Quark 3rd and 4th editions of a tour guide to the opening battles of the Revolutionary War, and combined parts from them into a 5th edition. The book's been around for a while, and the 3rd and 4th editions were quite different. This retrieval was a shitload of work. My result came out fabulous. Still in Quark, though.

I've been using Quark 10 for that kind of stuff for quite a while, but just bought the 2018/2019 update when they were having a $100-off sale. Haven't loaded the newer one yet, just wanted to grab it while it was on sale and I had some spare cash.

Having Quark experience — and a current working copy — landed me several publishing clients. After a few revision jobs, they began giving me fresh books to design and layout. Keeps me busy. I like the work. No one standing behind me yelling hurry up because the fool on 1st shift screwed up a job and the press is down, the client's pissed off, and I'm the only one who can save their useless asses. But I digress...

Mark Z's still in the game, but now he rents his apps for $200/year. I find that annoying, but I'm still about to go ahead and pay the $200 for his Quark --> InDesign converter and twist its tail. One of my clients has a whole lot of back list books in Quark and they'll happily pay me if I can successfully convert them to InDesign. In one respect, that means I might not get to work on those books, they do minor stuff in-house if it's InDesign. On the other hand, I won't have to work on those fucking Quark files!

Interestingly, current Quark works pretty good, little has changed in the interface, it still puts a white background and a runaround on every box you create, and still lets you click on fucking bold and italic "styles" even when the font family doesn't have bold and italic versions. They (ahem) look fine on the screen... but the PDFs it natively outputs are good enough that I've never had a complaint from a printer about them. Knock wood.

Hotmetal

My firm belief is that All Knowledge Resides in b4print, so here's my dilemma:

My best client had me attempting to make some word-search puzzle books a few months ago. They sent me some puzzles they'd made with a shareware software. The typesetting from the software was horrible, no options for point size, leading, font. All columns flush left, different spacing between columns in every file. Etc etc. It took me 20+ minutes to format each one so they looked nice, and had the same column-widths. The books they want me to do have 200 puzzles each.

Luckily (for me) they didn't like my cover designs,  so I politely told them I didn't know enough (if anything) about creating the type for world puzzle books, and that they should find a person or company with experience in these things.

Well... they just tried to drop it in my lap again. I found them a printer in India that claims this is their specialty. Anyone know of any U.S. printers who do large volumes of crossword and word-search puzzle books? I've put an hour into googling this for and didn't find any, other than the one in India.


 

I'm designing a 400+ page textbook with footnotes. Each chapter is a single Word .docx

I checked the preference in InDesign's File --> Place to import footnotes and it worked pretty well, bringing the footnotes in, more or less in position, as what appears to be a stand-alone cell. But there are formatting issues, like preserving italics, and thinking I've applied a style sheet only to find that it didn't actually change anything.

My web search took me to several discussions on writing scripts to deal with Indy formatting issues, and some posters offered to send scripts they had written. I don't belong to any of those groups, so I thought I'd ask here.

Anyone around here savvy with writing scripts like this? I was writing unix shell scripts 30 years ago, so I'm not totally in the dark. Can anyone help me out with a script or two they've written for this sort of thing that I could use as a model for building my own? That would be great!

HM

I finally got myself a newer Mac Pro (moving from 2006 to 2009 — one of my pals back at my old job found a 2009 on the IT guy's junk pile and grabbed it for me, upgraded it to 20GBs of ram and a new hardrive with Yosemite, works fine) and decided it was time to bit the bullet and move from good ol' Indy CS6 to the latest Indy, CC2017.

Now I'm finding that, when re-opening a file, the images all show OK links, but they appear on the screen as low-res. I have to manually re-link them to get the hi-res previews back. I've got all my InDesign application prefs set to hi-res previews, every place you can set that. They look good right after placing, but upon re-opening the file, they're shit. But since they show as "OK" in the link panel, I can't just say "relink all", I have to do each one individually...

I ran permissions repair, did a restart, still doing it. Arrrgh!

Doing a bunch of 8.5x11 sell sheets and 11x17 4-pagers for a machinery sales rep. They've done their own for years with MSWord but finally came to their senses and looked on Craigslist for a designer. One of the better client's I've found lately.

He has a Canon color laser and a color solid wax printer (probably a Xerox, only got a glance at it.) They like to print what they need on-the-fly on their own machines to fit the sales call they're going out on.

They like the color from the wax machine best, but it's 8.5x11 only. They have tried a bunch of coated papers from Office Depot and the like and can't find a medium-weight stock that works for them, for either machine.

I had some samples of sell sheets from another client that I'd output on my Epson Artisan 1430 (Claria inks) on Red River 50lb Arctic Polar Luster C2S and they loved it. It's lighter than the paper they'd been using, and feels more like something you'd get from offset. The samples of their own work they show'd me were almost card stock.

But Red River paper is inkjet only.

Looking for brand / source / product line recommendations with better selections than the chain office supply stores. Thanks!

I'm doing a bunch of books that are being reprinted with side-sewn spines, originally perfect bound.

The javascript that moves the page items away from the gutter works pretty good, but not on randomly locked page items.

I need a script that will go through an Indesign file (still on CS6 here) and unlock all the page items on all the pages.

Thanks!

(and while you're writing that one for me, I'll probably need one that does this in Quark one of these days, I'm still getting a lot of old Quark book files to revise)

This was posted in Quark downloads on October 14th. I just heard about it this morning from a Quark customer service person.

 http://www.quark.com/Support/Downloads/Search_Results.aspx?pid=1&oid=2&ftid=3

I'll have to go upstairs later to my wife's PC to test it out. My early MacPro stops at Lion. But it supposedly works in Windows 7.

I've got a shitload of files from my recent book projects to throw at this!

I could use a little advice on a tab-deliniated data merge from Excel into an InDesign data merge template on the master page.

It's just a 1-page marketing sheet, but there's 30+ versions. I've done this before in InDesign and it just went through like greased lightning, after combing out a few bugs and empty fields in the Excel file.

Tonight, instead of flowing all the fields in a row onto a page and going to the next page, it's insisting on treating the header text box like a linked text box, and flows all the text from one header box to the one on the next page, which it keeps generating on the fly until there are dozens of pages, with all the text running through the header text boxes it generates instead of populating the pages.

Annoyed? I've been doing data merges since I was a unix jock in the mid-1980s. Yes, annoyed!

 

I've got 3 Quark 6 Passport files and my research so far indicates that regular Quark 7 will open them, which would let me bring them forward, but I jumped from 6 to 9 and don't have 7. V9 says it can open them, but crashes when it tries.

Anyone got time to help me out here? Thanks!

I bought this iMac used on eBay with Snow Leopard already installed. I have the proper install disk, but I don't want to run the whole thing just to get the ColorSync utility back.

Apple's support pages have no answers, but I thought you guys might. I did find some comments regarding bugs and malware and ColorSync, seems like I have a vague memory of that. All I want is to be able to open a stupid locked PDF without digging an old mac out from the pile under the stairs and booting it up! Thanks!

I've got a couple G4 Digltal Audios and a G4 MDD. The DA's are my digiizers, one for LPs and casettes, the other has a Nikon Coolscan and an ancient 12x19 Umax Mirage II flatbed attached.

Both scanners are narrow SCSI. I've kept that DA on 9.2.2 because the scsi card works great and I don't have to screw around with adapters and shit. Been scanning a lot of slides and negs this winter. The MDD is my "modern" Mac, with Tiger and CS3, where I do all my color corrections and stuff.

Decided to replace the old Netgear 10/100 switch with an inexpensive gigabit switch (ZyXEL GS-108B from New Egg) to speed up transferring the scans. Getting gigabit speed uploading from the DA (9.2.2) to the MDD (Tiger) just fine, but I can not figure out why the file transfers to and from the MDD G4 to the older DA G4 still poke along at 100BaseT.

It's not mission critical, since I can upload the scans from the scanner mac to the photoshop mac at full speed. But it would be nice to be able to pull scans off the scanner mac while sitting at the MDD and get the full blast of gigabit speed traveling in that direction, too.

Been too busy screwing around with this today to even hum the We're So Sorry, Uncle Albert song, sheesh!

Will Quark 9 be the final version? Anyone using Quark at all? What versions are you seeing?

I only know what I "know" from the constant stream of marketing emails I get from Quark. I've owned my own copy since 1991, stopped upgrading at 6.52. I'm happy to still be on their mailing list even though I'm a lapsed Quark user with no intention of blowing $299 to bring myself back to the fold. Apparently they've forgiven me for whatever it was I said that caused them to delete my Quark Forum login. Several times. Ah, the good ol' Sofa...

The current deal is great, that $299 buys you an upgrade to 9 from any — repeat, any — previous version. Wow, that's some trick. I'd love to see any marketing statistics showing if they get any upgraders from version 3 and earlier!

But wait, there's more:  you'll get the free iDROPPER XTension and a 30% discount on Pro-Pack 9!

I'm all out of rants about the use and misuse of Quark itself. That old news has been down so long it looks like up to me these days.

Apparently the boss is attempting to fix a non-existent problem by buying an expensive software package that will automate the simple stuff but never, in my experience, be able to work its way through the really hard stuff no matter what the sales rep tells you. Most of what we do is extremely complicated and one-of-a-kind, and the files are always delivered in a big rush with alts coming in via email before the FTP download is done, and they were apparently built by a tradeshop in Elbonia.

Wasn't even sure where to post this as the Esko etc. keeps morphing. I've been a power-user since Artwork Systems was called PCC (for "Professional Computer Corporation") and now the boss has gone and bought i-Cut. I've been trying for years to get him to invest in some PDF and Pitstop training, but instead he's apparently bought into the automation fantasy of buying expensive all-incompasing software packages to do stuff that the less-competent operators can't be bothered to learn to do on their own. I personally don't think it has anything to do with learning and everything to do with not giving a shit.

Anyway —

Anyone have firsthand knowledge of i-Cut? Esko recently bought it from a company in Wisconsin. Looks like I'll be learning it. Fine with me, I love learning this shit. Even when it doesn't do what it claims it does and never gets used, I'll master it. It's what I do. (That and 50 cents gets me a cup of bad coffee.)

Anyone have a good recommendation for a competent print-on-demand book printer? I just had an annoying and slightly costly experience with a place in Tennessee printing a personal book project for me. They did two 100 copy runs, the second one actually looked right, but I had to pay for both. They were complete idiots, and smarmy ones at that, to work with. (PM me and I'll tell you who they are.)

Been having lots of fun since I upgraded my 2 x 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon to Snow Leopard on Friday evening. The truly bad part was neglecting to disconnect the weird 3rd party video setup leading to a big-screen TV hanging from the ceiling (for impressing clients - I refuse to wreck my neck turning around to look up at the stupid thing.) That mistake caused the initial reboot during the install to fail, and that forced me to reformat the drive.

But that's not my current problem. We're slow today and I don't mind sitting here reinstalling everything. I backed-up my personal doc folder and the big set of client fonts I've been building for the last 11 years to the server.

But now, although the font folder claims there's 65MB of data in it, the font files have that rectangular unix icon and claim to be unix executable files containing 0K data.

Copying them back to the Mac changes nothing. Suitcase ignores them. Does this have something to do with a missing resource fork? Sunspots? We've seen it happen before, but it doesn't happen every time you put fonts on the server. Just sometimes. Weird. Anyone know how to fix this?

From The Register today:

"Defendant must immediately destroy any technology, product, device, component, or part thereof in its custody or control that has been used to circumvent any technological protection measure that effectively controls access to plaintiff

If anyone is paying attention, the elephant in the Snow Leopard room is fonts. Various problems have been listed, but the one that affects prepress the most is the deliberate dropping of support for Postscript Type 1. Various geeks on the Apple forums are debating the "need" for this aging and cranky format we all love so much. And they can all bite me.

So far, the 10.6.1 bug fix didn't address the problem(s). Word is that the 10.6.2 fix won't do it either. However, enough knowledgeable prepress geeks have managed to submit technically acceptable bug reports to Apple (they won't listen to cranks like me who lack a high level of geeky terminology, you know) that, theoretically and possibly, Apple may catch on that they've just screwed one of their oldest and largest installed customer bases.

Then again, maybe not. That would then make this a stellar opportunity for Extensis and other font utility vendors to be the heroes, fix the problem, and cash in on selling us the upgrades. Providing it's something that can be fixed by a 3rd party...

Never seen this before in more than 20 years working with tiffs. We had a job on press with a bunch of 4/C 1" icons and someone pointed out (correctly) that the images were lower res than on the client-supplied matchprint. There was ample resolution in the originals. They were LZW compressed. They were placed in InDesign CS4. They looked perfectly smooth and high res in Photoshop. Even the previews (high quality mode) in Indy looked right.

But the pdf saved out of InDesign showed the low res when blown up on the screen. No one was looking for that because it's not something we see around here every day (not since we got rid of the OPI server...), and the job got plated like that. Pdf 1.3, max quality jpg compression. Took off the compression, same thing.

Saving all the tiffs to epses solved the res problem (same standard departmental pdf settings) and the job printed fine. I've been screwing around with the originals, saving them back and forth to different formats, saving without LZW (couldn't imagine why, but I tried it anyways.) Any ideas?

Those of us in prepress who beta tested Quark from version 2 forward and kept begging Quark to stop telling people to just "click on bold or italic" styles to get bold or italic type, or, even better, disable this dangerous bug pretending to be a feature, have finally won one! Or, almost, anyways. The "feature" is still functional, but now it at least throws up a warning.

Only about 19 years too late.

from the 8.12 readme PDF:

Intrinsic font controls

Intrinsic fonts are distinct font styles built into font families, such as "Times New RomanMT Std Bd" in the "Times New Roman MT Std" font family. Simulated fonts are computer-generated variations on intrinsic fonts. If you apply the Bold or Italic type style to a font, and that font's family that does not include a bold or italic variation as a separate intrinsic font, QuarkXPress creates a simulated bold or italic rendition of the font.

QuarkXPress displays warning icons to identify simulated fonts because simulated fonts can cause output problems...

output problems!

Don't know how you feel about monster.com these days, but this job might interest some of you:

http://jobview.monster.com/GetJob.aspx?JobID=80488401&aid=24852095&WT.mc_n=JSATS04