Thanks for looking at and trying these scripts. I hope you find them useful and informative.
To use these scripts yourself you’ll need a couple things:
• The Applescript Extension (***version 1.1***) which is available from Apple and sold through commercial vendors like MacWarehouse (800-255-6227) for around $149. It is well worth having. The scripts probably won't run with version 1.0.
If that's the case, open the text versions with the Apple Script Editor and save them as compiled scripts and use the new saved versions instead.
You might also consider purchasing the AppleScript developers Tooklit 1.1 which comes with AppleScript, the scriptable Finder, plus lots of goodies and documentation, including The Script Menu which places a menu icon next to Balloon help from which you can access a menu containing your scripts while in QuarkXPress. If you own 1.0, check about the upgrade to 1.1.
• Until the ScriptIt XTension is released you’ll also need a menu creating system extension to open a menu in XPress to play your script from. Most on-line services (including Applelink) have these in their libraries for downloading. OSA Menu from Lenard Rosenthal is a choice and is available on America On-Line. Use the AOL Quickfinder to locate the file. Go command-K, type in QuickFinder and once the Quickfinder dialog appears, type OSA in the field and hit a return. Also, The Script Menu mentioned above works fine as well.
• For the box guide placing script you'll need QuarkXPress version 3.3. This is because a bug in 3.2 caused guides to be place exactly 1-point off. If you want to adjust the script you can add a point in the formula so that it will work with 3.2, otherwise it'll be slightly off.
The other scripts work fine in 3.2
To use these scripts, load them in the OSA menu, and they’ll be available at any time in QuarkXPress. Just select them and watch what happens! Or you can run them from the Applescript Script editor. If you choose to do that note that you'll see all the actions of the script, when run from a menu, QuarkXPress delays to screen updates until the script is done-a big difference.
Also note:
If Applescript is something you’re interested in learning more about, then buy Danny Goodman’s excellent book, “The Complete AppleScript Handbook” published by Random House (0-679-79148-5) for $35. It’s the best thing I’ve read on the subject of AppleScript.
There’s not much material on the nuances of writing scripts for XPress, so to aid you in your search for XPress scripting nirvana, I’m releasing my new disk, “Sal’s Applescript Snippets for QuarkXPress” which will be available soon through XChange (800)788-7557. It contains over 50 useful, powerful scripts for working in QuarkXPress. They range from the simple scripts shown here to:
• creating grids of guides, picture or text boxes
• reporting font usage of a QXP document by dragging it over an icon on the desktop
• auto importing images from a folder into your layout
• slugging your layout and later auto-importing images and text files
• placing guides in exact locations
• converting numbers to text
• hyphenating or capitalizing text
• numbering paragraphs
• setting text box insets
• placing crop marks around a box
• shrinkwrapping picture boxes to the image they contain
• linking selected boxes and importing a text file into the new chain
• and many more production tools and examples.
Each script can be opened, examined for syntax and procedures, and copied (unless you think of a better way to write the example). They’re excellent learning material for beginning and intermediate XPress Scripters as well as being useful tools for everyone, scripters or not! And they’ll work with the soon to be released ScriptIt XTension.
Hope this has been helpful! If you have questions, contact me at:
