Quark 7 scripting... does it work well?

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

My company is considering the jump to QuarkXPress 7.2 from 6.5. I thought I’d ask the MacScripter community for some input before we take the leap. We have not gotten into extensive testing of our existing scripts yet. That will come in the next months. I would love to hear any insight or wisdom that you might have about this topic. Below are sme of my general questions.

What sort of AppleScripting issues should I watch out for? What just does not work? What is just down-right broken?

Are new 7.x features scriptable? Job jackets? Transparencies? etc?

What works well or better than it did in Quark 6.5?

Feel free to PM or e-mail me offlist as well.

Thanks!

Jeff Walters

#2

Jeff,

I also have been considering this leap… I did take my existing script and upgraded it there were only two things which I need to change

  1. was how to specify the color when setting the print setting

2 was how to specify the preview form at for EPS files.

then there was saving down to vers 60 it seems you have to save it as a seven File first then save as vers 60 ohh and when you open the 6.x version in 6.x you get a multi languge dialog if you want to prevent that dialog from occurring you may have to GUI script the save done I did not see any options to do this through native scripting.

the other thing I noticed while processing there was a graphic box that had a fill color and when the script imported a transparent graphic it lost the fill color.

thats is all I have to contribute at this time my tests are still preliminary… should anyone have a fix for the save down issue I would love to know about it. I do suspect that there are more problems

mm

#3

Thanks for the reply and the information. Very helpful! I have an opportunity to speak with a Quark representative in the near future. I’ll pass this information on to them. It would be great to be able to have the dialogs suppressed and accessible via script commands so that resorting to GUI scripting was not necessary.

I’ll incorporate these issues into my testing as well and see if I can find any additional workarounds.

Jeff