4

Customizing avenue.quark

Different people tend to use a tool in different ways. Fortunately, avenue.quark offers a variety of options that help you to customize the way it works to fit the way you work.

You can control the color of tagged and untagged content (Utilities > Show Tagged Content), set the color of the XML markers that display when you choose View > Show Invisibles, and turn dynamic content updating on and off.

Avenue.quark uses several default settings to control how tagged content is displayed, specify the color of marker text, and turn dynamic content updating on and off. These settings are saved with the application and are never saved with documents. To modify avenue.quark preferences:

1. Choose Edit > Preferences > avenue.quark to display the avenue.quark Preferences dialog box.

Use the avenue.quark Preferences dialog box to specify how tagged text appears in a document.

2. To specify the color that is used to display tagged content when you choose Utilities > Show Tagged Content, click the Tagged Text button and then choose a color in the resulting dialog box.

3. To specify how avenue.quark handles rule-based tagging, check or uncheck the check boxes in the Rule/Position Options area:

• The Always insert repeating elements at the end of the current branch check box controls the placement of new repeating elements (elements marked with a + or in the DTD). When this box is checked, avenue.quark always puts new repeating elements at the end of the active branch. When this check box is unchecked, avenue.quark displays the Choose Rule/Position dialog box and lets you manually choose the position of a new repeating element.
• The Always use first available path for elements with multiple insertion paths check box controls the placement of new elements that could be inserted in a number of places according to the DTD. For example, say a tagging rule calls for the creation of a <paragraph> element. If the DTD states that a new <paragraph> element may be created either at the end of the current branch or as a child of a new <sidebar> element, which kind of <paragraph> element should avenue.quark generate? If this check box is checked, avenue.quark creates the first <paragraph> element it finds in the DTD tree (a <paragraph> element at the root level of the current branch). If this check box is unchecked, avenue.quark displays the Choose Rule/Position dialog box.
• The Always use the first applicable tagging rule check box applies to tagging rule conflicts. When this box is checked, avenue.quark always chooses the first of a series of applicable rules in tagging rule conflicts. When this box is unchecked, avenue.quark displays the Choose Rule/Position dialog box and lets you manually choose the element type to be applied to the selected text or click Choose Automatically.

For more information about how rule-based tagging works, see "Understanding Rule Weighting" in this chapter.

4. To specify the color that is used to display non-tagged content when you choose Utilities > Show Tagged Content, click the Untagged Text button and then choose a color in the resulting dialog box.

5. To specify the color of the markers that display when you choose View > Show Invisibles, click the Marker Text button and then choose a color in the resulting dialog box.

6. To specify that the content of elements in active XML documents should be continuously updated to reflect the content of the QuarkXPress items they're linked to, check Enable Dynamic Content Update. You might want to uncheck this button if QuarkXPress seems to be running very slowly when editing large XML documents; you can manually update the content when this box is unchecked by clicking the Synchronize Content button in the XML Workspace palette.

7. Click OK.

When the selected text can be tagged using more than one tagging rule, avenue.quark displays the Choose Rule/Position dialog box (unless Always use the first applicable tagging rule is checked in the avenue.quark Preferences dialog box). The rules that can be applied are then sorted according to their weight and displayed in the Element Type field.

Tagging rules are weighted as follows, with items nearer the top of the list being weighted higher than items nearer the bottom:

• A rule that targets a character style sheet, a color, and a type style.
• A rule that targets a character styles sheet, plus either a color or a type style.
• A rule that targets a character style sheet only.
• A rule that targets a color and a type style only.
• A rule that targets either a color or a type style only.
• A rule that targets a paragraph style sheet, a color, and a type style.
• A rule that targets a paragraph style sheet plus either a color or a type style.
• A rule that targets a paragraph style sheet only.

For example, say you have a paragraph style named "Body-P" and a character style sheet named "Italic-C," and you're applying the "Italic-C" style sheet to emphasized words in your "Body-P" paragraphs. You'd like to tag all of your paragraphs as <bodyText> elements, with the emphasized words in those paragraphs tagged as <emphasized> elements.

When avenue.quark encounters an "Italic-C" word in a "Body-P" paragraph, two rules can be applied: the rule that says text styled as "Body-P" should be tagged as <bodyText>, and the rule that says text styled as "Italic-C" should be tagged as <emphasized>. But the second rule is given more weight, according to the scale above, and thus is listed first (and chosen automatically if you click Choose Automatically). As a result, your XML looks something like this:

This example assumes that the DTD allows the <bodyText> element to contain both PCDATA and <emphasized> elements.

The rule weighting algorithm is designed to make the Choose Automatically button in the Choose Rule/Position dialog box work correctly in most tagging situations. If this button does not give you the results you want, though, you can still choose a rule manually in the Element Type field.