[softwarelist] Re: Converting documents to Quark
- From: Anthony Hilton <ajh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Ovation Pro List <davidpilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:28:17 +0100 (BST)
In <URL:news:local.opro> on Thu 12 Jun, David Pilling wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Someone has approached me with a book he has done in Impression. His
> publishers want it in Quark format. The book is structured as lots of
> frames with text in - there's no large body text that flows through the
> document, instead each page has four non-linked frames with text in.
>
> I wondered if anyone has any suggestions as to how to tackle this
> problem.
>
> I'm considering writing some software to help, if I do that I want to
> make the software useful for the users of Ovation Pro.
>
> I can load the documents into Ovation Pro, the question is what format
> to save them out in?
>
> Approaches I have tried and discarded are - print to PDF, PDF to Word
> conversion (loses all the style information), save text as DDF, DDF to
> Word using Techwriter (hard work because there are so many stories).
I would have expected PDF to be the one which would best preserve layout and
fonts, and I would expect Quark can import PDF. Why have you rejected that
option?
My next thought would be PS - can Quark import PostScript? It may require EPS
and I don't think we've got a way of generating EPS except via Ghostscript
and EPS is a single-page format so no help for this document.
I don't know Impression so the following is purely my thought processes which
you may already have been through :-)
From a DDF file is it possible to get the text into a single 'story'?
Is it possible to save all the text from Impression in a single operation?
Even if it resulted in multiple files combining them into one would be quite
simple.
Is it possible to remove the story end and start tags from a DDF file to make
a single story?
Back to the OPro theme - the Save as RTF I have (!MakeRTF from David
Breakwell I believe) saves all stories into one file. A couple of test
documents saved as RTF and read into OPro, and Techwriter on RISC OS and then
Word 2003, Wordpad, and OpenOffice Writer on WinXP all have problems. Only
OpenOffice Writer gets the layout of a single page letter with 2 stories
nearly correct. None of them import the whole of the second test file -
OPro displays all except the last page (2 stories), Techwriter, Wordpad and
OpenOffice Writer stop at the same point (on page 4 of 18 in the original
OPro doc) and Word only displays the paragraph which the others fail in the
middle of, stopping at the same point.
If you (David) are writing anything for OPro I would appreciate any
improvement you can make to the Save as RTF option.
Anthony
--
ajh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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