re Quark Tags

[OkAnnie@xxxxxxxx]

Jack Shafer: I logged on to volunteer this to you AO mail, but
since you asked ...

It sounds like your in-house advice is coming from Mac Quark
folks (e.g., you must use the same code to cancel an attribute).
If that's true I have a few suggestions:

1. If your production department's QXP is on Macs and you don't
have QXP in your machine, try hard to get a copy of Windows QXP
for yourself, and *learn it.* Mac folks are incurably
fenestrophobic and will say it's not true, but
Mac and Windows QXP are functionally virtually identical. Quark
has gone to great lengths to make it so. If your publication
can't swing the $550, all may not be lost. When Quark introduced
Windows QXP it offered a $10 demo that was full-featured except
for color separations and it limited printing to five pages with
a huge DEMO stamp on each. (Anyone who can program PostScript can
easily excise the DEMO code from PS files and have a $10 five-page-limit
QXP.) Quark has upgraded QXP a couple of times since then, so the
demo may not be offered now. If you can't get the full version,
at least try to get the demo. (Of course don't try this with
under 8 megs of RAM plus a substantial swap file.)

2. Whether or not you have or can get a copy of QXP, buy David Blatner's "The
QuarkXPress Book" (Peachpit) and study--especially--the Copy Flow and Type &
Typography chapters. Comes in Windows and Mac versions. *Must reading.*

3. The choice between XPress Tags and xyWrite style sheets
(they're mutually exclusive) is the choice between having
exquisite control over typographic detail or turning it over to
graphics types. Depends on how hands-on you like to be. QXP's
built-in xyWrite style sheet filter is very crude indeed. I don't
know the NAPs filters Leslie mentions; they're probably an Xtension.
QXP, as you probably know, lives or dies by third-party support, and
Xtensions intended for use by commercial publications often run over $1000.
If this is the case, I'd choose a copy of Windows QXP and the
XPress Tags system, which lets you do all--and I do mean
*all*--formatting in xyWrite.

If you'd like a copy of my QXP keyboard and printer file, email me on AO and
I'll zip them and pass them along. The keyboard is usable only on my
(physical) keyboard, which has unorthodox key distribution, and
my xyW function keys are totally unrelated to the defaults. You
might get some ideas from it anyway if you ignore the numbers.
The printer file substitution tables should be useful. I use Mac,
not Windows, coding. Caveat: I have a hectic week ahead.  --Annie
Fisher