RE: Converting Quark books to FrameMaker

Subject: RE: Converting Quark books to FrameMaker
From: "Peter Swisher" <PeteS -at- bmgi -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 09:59:36 -0700


Hopefully someone will have more to add than I.

First of all, good luck! This will probably be time consuming. Based on
my Quark experience, you may want to consider working out this process
and handing it off to a contractor. However, I have no experience with
Frame and little with Word, so I really only know a third to a half of
what I'm talking about!

The first thing you'll want to do is look for a Quark or Frame extension
that will accommodate your needs.

For Quark, go start at the Xtensions catalog:
http://www.quark.com/products/xtensions/xt_directory.html

If that doesn't work, try the XTensions forum:
http://www.quark.com/cgi-bin/WebX

For Frame, try their Web site.

If you cannot find a direct Quark to Frame XTension, you could use an
XTension that I know exists, the Quark / MS Word filter. I know this
will let you import MS Word docs into Quark and maintain the styles.
Hopefully, it will let you do the reverse. Don't know. Never had to try
it.

If all this fails, you should be able to directly export a Quark text
chain to plain text format. I don't have Quark in front of me and I
haven't used it in 5 months (when I last worked at Quark), so I'm not
sure exactly how well this works. This may only export to XTags, which
is Quark-proprietary and won't help you. However, there should be an
XTension for going to TXT format...

You will most likely not be able to export the whole document. Quark is
a design first program. Text content is secondary to the layout.
Depending on the Quark users level of expertise, the layout is either a
mish-mash of textual or image containers (respectively called text boxes
and picture boxes). The boxes are laid out. If text must flow from one
box to another, a text chain was hopefully created. However, a Quark
document typically does not have one text chain flow throughout the
whole document. Depending on the size, complexity and type of document,
there could be as few as 20 or as many as.. Lord knows how many separate
text chains. You will only be able to export one text chain at a time.

If all else fails, open up the apps side-by-side and cut and paste.

Again, good luck!

- Pete

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