I have an older QXP 4 file of a book layout. It was poorly laid out in multiple text boxes (over 2000). It’s a large cookbook of 700+ recipes and each recipe has three separate text boxes. I am reformatted the book and need all of the raw text in linked text boxes that will flow inside one document. I have tried everything (exporting, importing, copying, pasting, pdf creation, etc.) to get this text – in the right order in a new QXP document. I don’t have to maintain the formatting (although that would be preferable), but need the raw text in the right order. The problem is that there is no way to link “full” text boxes so that it can all be selected at once. It can only be done one text box at a time.
I have no experience with scripts, but am a seasoned QXP user. I have QXP 4, 5, and 6.5 at my disposal on OS9 and OSX. Is there a script available to select text in a text box, copy it to another document, and keep doing this one text box after another? Or is there any other solution?
Thank you for any help, Scott Whitaker
Scott,
I don’t have QXP (though I used to use it a lot), but was wondering if you were able to solve this problem or if you are still needing help?
Don’t know if this helps but; I had a similar problem with an InDesign document. I created a PDF of the entire document (took a while but worth it), opened it in acrobat and selected all of the text.
If you are unable to select text on more than the current page. Go to Acrobat Preferences and in the Page Display setup, select Continuous in the dropdown box beside Default Page Layout. Then you can go back to the page view and select from the TOOLS drop down menue Advanced Editing, then Text Touch up.
Click in any of the text areas and Select All (cmd+A) or (cntrl+A) and all text on all pages should be highlighted. Copy and paste into Quark.
Super Cool!
do this part by hand
Open the doc in quark 6.5
select the boxes of first recipe
goto the scripts menu → Stories → link selected boxes
repeat for each recipe
write script to do the rest
alternatively you could
Open the doc in quark 6.5
select the boxes of first recipe
group them
repeat for each recipe
write script to do the rest
in this scenerio you will spend less time doing things manully and more time writing code to link the boxes of the group box
but you can hack it out of the above mentioned script…
I hope this helps