Does Reusing A Quark Express Template Corrupt It

Editor's Note: In May 2019, I stayed with Charles Maurer and his wife Daphne for a few days while attention the Standoff conference in Toronto. At that point, Charles was in the final throes of laying out their book, Pretty Ugly: Why we like some songs, faces, foods, plays, pictures, poems, etc., and dislike others . Every twenty-four hour period when I came back from the conference, I found Charles at his Mac, swearing at the latest trouble created by QuarkXPress. Although I don't know QuarkXPress, I've laid out many books in Adobe InDesign and take years of experience working with PDF ebooks. I tin can thus say, from personal experience, that what Charles relates here is only the tip of the iceberg of what he went through. In the cease, later on much troubleshooting and experimentation, the all-time I could recommend was that he cutting his losses and switch to InDesign, a luxury that he couldn't afford given publishing deadlines. –Adam Engst

If you ever need a page layout application, exercise not buy QuarkXPress.

Eighteen months ago, I needed to lay out an illustrated book. The only heavy-duty choices at the time were QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. Both offered demos, so I tried both. Both seemed to have comparable features and limitations. I found InDesign more disruptive, and I dislike Adobe—Artistic Cloud requires a pricey subscription and fills your drive with files—so I bought a re-create of QuarkXPress.

What a error! QuarkXPress is the most bug-ridden application I have used in 36 years of working with the Mac.

You would not desire to read the full litany of the faults I plant—fifty-fifty assuming I could think them all—but here are a few problems that give a sense of what I put up with.

In QuarkXPress, a book requires a set of separate files for each chapter and section, plus two special files that go on track of the book's contents and pagination. QuarkXPress crashes and so ofttimes that I learned to salvage my work every 5 or 10 seconds and to keep open up only the chapters I was working on. This strategy largely preserved my chapter files, but information technology did not prevent the special files from becoming corrupt. For case, once when trying to open up the book, I saw this unintelligible alert:

The selected Chore Jacket is not the missing Job Jacket. Press OK to supervene upon the previously linked Job Jacket with the selected one. Warning, if y'all supplant the Job Jacket, the structure of your volume most volition be deleted [sic].

If I clicked the default OK push, this bulletin popped upwardly:

This is not a Job Jacket file.

If I clicked Cancel, I saw:

This volume cannot be opened because information in the Job Ticket is damaged.

I quit QuarkXPress, deleted its cache, reopened the application, and tried to utilize backup copies of the special files. The same messages appeared. Somewhen—I don't remember how—I managed to piece of work past those dialogs, only I however haven't regrown all the pilus I pulled out in the process.

Another time, dialogs popped up saying that I needed to create the special files afresh by saving the individual capacity under a new proper name and recreating the book. When I did this, QuarkXPress worked… for a couple of minutes. Then it crashed over again, and once again corrupted its files.

At this point, I wrote to Quark support asking for help. I told them that I had given upwards on most of the automatic features that the special volume files were supposed to enable—cantankerous-referencing, maintaining a table of contents, indexing—but I preferred not to renumber all of the pages past hand. I asked if at that place was a workaround for inbound the starting page number of each chapter manually and an easy way to assemble the chapters manually. They replied that answering my question required my paying them a fee.

If an application cannot maintain its ain files without corrupting them, and so any self-respecting developer would figure out why or provide a workaround, not charge for support. I would call this a form of ransomware.

Eventually, I gave up trying to replace the special files with backups and tried replacing the entire book with the previous night'southward mirror: 171 items, 2.6 GB. That worked—until QuarkXPress destroyed the files over again.

Very few controls and functions worked unremarkably and reliably. Just press chapters ofttimes proved hard. For example, this bulletin popped up repeatedly:

You accept applied a faux bold mode to an area that contains a transparency, which might cause the font to display incorrectly in your final output. Use a bold version of this typeface to avoid output issues. Exercise you want to proceed?

Troubleshooting this error took a lot of time considering the bulletin said nothing about the location of the trouble and because, despite the mistake message, the problem turned out to have nothing to practise with any font or even with text. I wanted a box containing a flick, so I divers a box—a rectangle with thin lines—then pasted a PNG file into it. This is a normal way to lay out a page, but information technology turned out that QuarkXPress wanted me to paste the flick first and then draw the box. When I finally stumbled across that solution, the font error stopped appearing when I tried to impress.

I used QuarkXPress 2018. Since then, Quark has released 2 new versions, each with more than features. More features might be useful, but only if the application works, and the version I used was so bad that I cannot conceive the new releases to be worth trying.

I accept insufficient knowledge to recommend alternatives to QuarkXPress for volume production, merely my friends who use InDesign say it works well. More recently, an inexpensive culling has appeared that looks interesting: Affinity Publisher ($49.99). For pamphlets and posters, Apple's Pages ought to be adequate, just I use and can recommend the more than malleable EazyDraw ($95).

If you plant the information in this commodity valuable, Charles asks that you pay a footling for information technology by making a donation to the assist organization Doctors Without Borders.

Does Reusing A Quark Express Template Corrupt It,

Source: https://tidbits.com/2020/07/22/unless-you-are-a-masochist-do-not-buy-quarkxpress/

Posted by: greentheopect.blogspot.com

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